Semantic structure of the oral message and its mam components

Linguistics distinguishes between the notions of meaning, sense and semantics [see Бондарко 2001 57-61, Падучева 1985: 7-19, Чернов 1987: 64-78]. The term semantics has three meanings: 1) contents, all information rendered by lin­guistic units; 2) the branch of linguistics dealing with contents or information ren­dered by linguistic units; 3) one of the fields of semiotics (the study ofsigns and sign using behaviour) [Лингвистический энциклопедический словарь 1990:438].

Meaning of linguistic units is usually described as their contents reflected in the respective dictionaries or grammar books. The notion of sense goes outside pure linguistics and has to do. first of all, with the context and situation of communication (the subject field ofcommunication, aims of participants, their background knowledge, etc). Therefore sense of linguistic units comes to life in real speech as a result of relations established between meanings of linguistic units and communicative situations [Чернов 1987:65]. And indeed, it is prac­tically impossible to translate such words as, for instance, coach, challenge, benchmark, event, network, intervention, cohesion, outstanding, fantastic, pow­erless, admit, account, run, рахунок, партія, фракція, справа (or practically any other word) until the word is placed in the context and until the act of predication (i.e. creation of a proposition) takes place. Therefore, interpreters render the sense of linguistic units, which is generated in each particular act of speech as a result of producing messages by the speakers.

Messages, both written and oral, have certain semantic structure, the main element of which is the proposition, i.e a “picture” of the world, a “state­ment” about the world, which may be true or false, which is (normally) pro­nounced with a certain purpose, and which (normally) has the subject and the Predicate (elements of the predicative group), e.g. “It is cold outside”', “Frosts ^are expected for tonight“Kyiv is the capital city of Ukraine ”, etc.

However messages, to acquire sense and become “workable” acts of speech, ^must also contain the following components, which may be verbally expressed (explicit) or “hidden” (implicit):

■ the deictic component:orientation of the message with regard to the "per­son”, space” and ‘time”, e.g. I warn you that it is probably cold outside -.

■ the modal component:treating of the proposition by the speaker as pos­sible, impossible, desired, mandatory, unnecessary, likely, unlikely, doubt ful etc, e.g. I warn you that it is probably cold outside;

■ the evaluative component (оцшнии компонент): positive or negative evalu­ation of the elements of the proposition by the speaker (or absence of such evaluation — “zero evaluation”), e.g. / warn you that it is cold (negative evaluation) outside, so, since you are unwell (negative evaluation), you’d rather wear your warm (positive evaluation) sweater;

■ the pragmatic component: indicator of the aim of pronouncing the utter ance (communicative intent or intention) as it is viewed by the speaker [see Почегшов 1975, Austin 1961, Searle 1979|, e.g. I warn (the act of warning) you that it is cold outside.

It is quite obvious that for interpretation to be successful it is not enough to translate only the “propositional element” of the message but also to render all other components of its semantic structure, thus ensuring that it “makes sense” for the listener and produces desired (by the original speaker) effect upon him/her.