The Speaker's Perspective in Grammar and Lexicon

In this book, Valentina Zaitseva develops a framework in which language and communication emerge as interrelated aspects of human cognitive behavior. Russian and English predicates of speech production/perception are analysed as lexical representations of a prototypical discourse situation corresponding to Yokoyama's universal model of communication. The semantic, pragmatic and syntactic behavior of these predicates receives a systematic and principled explanation (including prediction of the performative function, treated as idiosyncratic in Speech Act theory) applicable to other lexical and syntactic structures. Synthesizing recent achievements in discourse theory and cognitive functional linguistics, the book offers a theoretical innovation by establishing a unified conceptual basis of the speaker's coding and communicative competences, and describes objective and predictable mechanisms for rendering the speaker's personal, subjective knowledge, specific (contextual) meanings, attitudes, etc. through the linguistic code.