STRUCTURAL ORGANIZATION OF THE ЕNGLISH SENTENCE AS A FRACTAL OBJECT

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the English sentences’ structural organization with application of Fractal Theory’s ideas and principles. In this scientific research the main parameters of fractals’ systemic organization have been outlined and their relevance to the English sentence structure characterizing has been proved, correlations between thought and language units in evolutionary retrospection have been revealed, the invariant structural organization of the English sentences as language units has been characterized and its variable manifestation in speech has been illustrated and described.

It has been stated that the language invariant in English syntactic units is the subject-predicate structure (S-P), filled up with semantic content actual for a certain communication act. In speech this structure is exteriorizes by appropriate functional variants. The indicated subject-predicate structure is recognized to be a pattern of self-similarity, since it is reproduced as far as the elementary sentence extends into a composite one. In English sentences this structure reflects the relations not only between the subject and the predicate but also between the nominal and the verbal in predicative complexes. Different word-combinations distinguished in a sentence also refer to S-P structures since they can be interpreted as elementary sentences (e. g.: a/the beautiful girl = The girl is beautiful.; speak Italian = Italian is spoken (here).)

These signs of self-similarity, or scale invariance, within a sentence attest its fractal nature. Each fractal structure of prediction represented in the sentence manifests a particular situation, “shaped” like a phrase.

The development of a syntactic fractal is effected in the extending of the correlated sentence. The means of extending a sentence are single words, phrases, predicative complexes, clauses of different types, which becoming parts of a simple sentence (elementary fractal) make it self-organize and develop. The most important features of the sentence as a fractal object are the scale invariance, the fuzziness of its boundaries, the potential ability of its constituents to be the basis for prediction and further hierarchization of their structural relations, non-linearity ways of development.