COMMUNICATIVE ORGANISATION OF SIMPLE SENTENCE IN THE MODERN GERMAN LANGUAGE (BASED ON MEDIA DISCOURSE)

Abstract

This article offers a communicative study of the simple sentence in the modern German language based on media discourse. Important terms of syntax and pragmatics, such as “simple sentence”, “clause”, “word order”, “utterance”, “speech act”, “illocution”, “thematic progression” and others are discussed here too. The simple sentence (or a monome) is an art of a sentence, which consists of a subject-predicate basis and can also include secondary sentence parts. A basic sentence can be complicated by objects, attributes or adverbial modifiers. It also can include several secondary sentence parts at the same time. On the communicative level a simple sentence appears as a speech act. Traditionally, there is one speech act with an illocution in a micro speech act (mostly, a constative or a quesitive). Directives are not so popular in the media discourse of the modern German, commissives are not found in the analyzed material. The main feature of media discourse – to inform the readers and to represent actual facts in some topics and about some processes, events or people – is the explanation for that. Intertextuality is one of the important features of a simple sentence in the media discourse. It appears, when parenthesis is taken into the basic structure of a sentence. Added layers of information clarify the utterance, including some facts or corrections of the author. They can be built using one word, a combination of words, but also a simple sentence, an infinitive construction or a participial construction. Parcellation is a special feature of a simple sentence in the media discours. As a result, one or several parts are separated from the main part of the sentence. Several utterances, which appear in a such way, usually differ from the whole utterance because of its expressiveness, they make accents on some parts of the information in the context. By the forming of an utterance, clusters of information in the simple sentences can be added due to two different ways. In the majority of cases the information is added linearly, at first they add a theme, then a rheme. One of the ways of highlighting of a cluster of information is inversion. Due to the preposition of a secondary sentence part (often, adverbial modifier), speakers highlight a special block, that, according to their point of view, includes the most important information. Thereby, a rheme comes before a theme, which is dislocated in the second part of the utterance.