УНИВЕРСАЛЬНОСТЬ И ЭВРИСТИЧЕСКИЙ ПОТЕНЦИАЛ СИНТАКСИЧЕСКОЙ ТЕОРИИ А. А. ШАХМАТОВА
UNIVERSALITY AND HEURISTIC POTENTIAL OF A. A. SHAKHMATOV’S SYNTACTIC THEORY

Summary/Abstract: The article analyzes the syntactic theory of A. A. Shakhmatov from the point of view of its heuristic potential and relevance for modern linguistics. It proves that the concept of communication as the psychological basis of a sentence introduced by A. A. Shakhmatov in the early XX century has always been a reliable key to understanding the sentence as the most important linguistic unit and to explain the directions of its historical development. In contrast to the prevailing opinions in European linguistics, according to which in a combination of two notions that form the basis of a sentence any of them can be the main one depending on the will of the speaker, A. A. Shakhmatov argued that the dominant and subordinate notions of communication depend not on the will of the speaker, but on their own nature: the dominant idea is the idea of a substance in the material world, while the subordinate idea is the idea of its changeable sign or characteristic. This variability of the idea of a characteristic, dictated by the nature of what it denotes, is the impetus for syntactic changes in a sentence, because language, which reflects the experience of ethnic existence, is the most important means for expressing ethnic thinking. This is the essence and heuristic potential of the syntactic theory of A. A. Shakhmatov convincingly confirmed by research on the historical syntax of the Russian language.

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