Английский язык. Ч. 2. Гималетдинова Г.К - 11 стр.

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shall mean that it was the dog that did the biting and John that suffered it. But it is
not at all part of the order of nature: it is just one of the conventions of our lan-
guage. In normal English sentences, the Subject (‘The dog’) comes before the
Verb (‘bit’), which itself comes before the Direct Object (‘John’), and it is this word-
order which tells us which is the biter and which is the bitten. But this S-V-O word-
order is not found in all languages: many languages, like Turkish and classical
Latin, have the equivalent of ‘The dog John bit’ (S-O-V); some, like Welsh, have
the equivalent of ‘Bit the dog John’ (V-S-O). In some languages, for example
Russian, the word-order is very free, and it is word-endings alone which show
which is the Subject (‘biter’) and which the Object (‘bitten’). Nor is the word-order
of ‘The dog’ universal: the order here is Determiner-Noun, which is obligatory in
English, but some languages have the order Noun-Determiner. In Swedish, for
example, ‘dog’ is hund, but ‘the dog’ is ‘hunden’, the definite article being attached
to the end of the noun. In fact the permissible arrangements of words, and the
meanings of particular arrangements, vary from language to language.
rule                           conventions                  Determiner-Noun
set of rules                   the Subject                  obligatory
to combine words into utter-   the Verb                     Noun-Determiner
    ances                      the Direct Object            Swedish
complicated                    word-order                   definite article
to regulate                    Turkish                      to be attached
to put together                Classical Latin              permissible arrangement of
the order of nature            Welsh                           words
to bite                        free word-order              meanings of particular ar-
to suffer                      word-ending                     rangements
      Задание 2. Сделайте письменный перевод текста Б.
                                      Teкст Б
                               Context of Situation
      The synchronic approach to meaning is intended to deal with the description
and analysis of the many important factors observable in the use of different
words in sentences in addition to any specific reference to isolated bits of the en-
vironment. In Great Britain meaning in linguistic analysis and linguistic theory has
in the main been dealt with in terms of context of situation. That is a concept de-
veloped by Malinowski and Firth as a means of explaining the working of lan-
guage in society. By setting up contexts of situation, the observer or analyst un-
dertakes to state the relationships of utterances to the situations or environments
in which they are said or could be said. In a context of situation the utterance or
the successive sentences in it are brought into multiple relations with the relevant
components of the environment. Meaning is, in the first place, the functioning of
the sentence or the utterance, though for some reasons it is convenient to refer a
good deal, but by no means all, of the description of sentence meaning to the
separate meanings of its component words.
      Language serves a great variety of purposes, and utterances perform a very
wide range of functions. To mention only a few uses of language, one can distin-
guish poetry of all kinds, rhetoric, narrative and historical records, ritual and
ceremonial utterances, the forms of legal, political, commercial, and administra-
tive operations etc. Language, which is the concern of the linguist in all its aspects
and functions, thus embraces very much more than the formal discourse of phi-