THE SYNTACTIC CONCEPT ‘MENTAL ACTIVITY’ ON THE EXAMPLE OF ENGLISH COMPLEX SENTENCES WITH AN OBJECT CLAUSE

Abstract

The syntactic concept ‘MENTAL ACTIVITY’ describes the intellectual and mental activity of the subject-agent in relation to a certain object-theme. Based on the conducted conceptual analysis, such conceptual characteristics as “orientation on agent” and “orientation on object” were singled out. The syntactic concept ‘MENTAL ACTIVITY’, extracted from the typical constructions of the complex sentences with an object clause based on American English, is most often found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English in fiction (35%) and spoken texts (26%), slightly less in popular magazines (18 %) and newspapers (15%), and the least – in scientific journals (6%). The study showed that as means of representing the concept of ‘MENTAL ACTIVITY’, the twoactant-circumstantial constructions and two-actant constructions are defined as prototypical. Using the modeling method, structural and semantic models were developed for each of these constructions. We consider it promising to further model the conceptual space of syntax based on other types of complex and compound sentences in American English.