## Towards a Multifunctional Grammar. 'Language, Reality and Mind' in a Grammatical Description

## Abstract

Previous grammars of the Russian language are written on the same methodological background and with the same purpose and may therefore be characterized in their entirety. It appears that they (1) are oriented towards the interpretive function, i.e. the hearer,  (2)  describe  the  different  parts  of  the  grammar  in  isolation  without  internal connection,  (3)  lack  a  contrastive  element  and  finally  (4)  incorporate  only  written sources. In that respect previous grammars fail and cannot live up to what could be called modern standards. Against this background a new type of grammar is proposed a grammar which (1) takes the speaker into consideration, (2) differentiates three types of 'wrongness', (3) views the Russian language as a specific member of a linguistic supertype which is opposed to two other supertypes, and (4) takes its starting point in speech production, i.e. in oral discourse. After a theoretical discussion several pieces of evidence will be presented in favour of such type of grammar.

## 1. The traditional approach in Russian grammar

Although new grammars are written in order to compensate for shortcomings experienced with previous grammars, they need not include a new framework or be based on totally new principles. In fact, it appears that relatively new grammars of the Russian language (e.g. Wade 1992, Mathiassen 1990, Christensen 1992,  ˇ Svedova & Lopatin 1989) do not distinguish themselves in any way from previous grammars (Isaˇ cenko 1975, Mulisch 1975, TJAG 1979, AG 1980). It seems - more or less as  if  the  new  grammars  are  echoes  of  their  predecessors  with  an admixture  of  modern  pedagogical  principles,  which  need  not  be  an improvement if simplicity supersedes insightfulness. In the following I

* Per Durst-Andersen Modern Languages. Russian Section Copenhagen Business School 15 Dalgas Have DK-2000 Frederiksberg E-mail: Durst/fra@CBS.DK

shall attempt to describe what the above- mentioned grammars have in common from the point of view methodology and current grammatical practice. Although I will confine my criticism to Russian grammars, I think that the four characteristics to be examined below are applicable to grammars of other languages as well.

## 1.1. The orientation towards interpretation

A grammar may be used in two ways: to interpret or to produce spoken or written utterances. All existing grammars of the Russian language are constructed solely on an interpretive basis which means that they take their starting point in reception (comprehension). An interpretively oriented grammar takes some data as input, e.g. an utterance involving the  perfective  aspect,  and  yields  a  meaning  as  output,  e.g.  an  action viewed in its totality. In other words, an interpretation can be said to have the form of an inductive inference:

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When  testing  what  will  be  called  the interpretive  power  of  a grammar one  could  set  up  three  requirements  corresponding  to  the three boxes. The descriptions resulting from an interpretively adequate grammar should be (1) exhaustive , i.e. it should be suited to handle all data; (2) unequivocal ,  i.e.  at  best,  the  same  rule  or  feature should be applied  to  all  data  or,  at  least,  the  reader  should  know  which  rules should be applied to which data; and (3) meaningful , i.e. it should give interpretations that are relevant and precise in meaning (translations to the readers' mothertongue are not enough to satisfy this requirement). It is  not my intention here to go into further details with respect to the three requirements - I only want to point out that it is extremely difficult -  if  not  totally  impossible  -  for  a  grammar  to  satisfy  the  last  two mentioned  requirements  if  it  is  hearer-oriented.  In  order  to  satisfy requirements  (2)  and  (3)  we  need  a  speaker-oriented  grammatical component with a speaker-related notion as intention ,  i.e.  the  notion that corresponds to the pragmatic notion of sense ( mening in Danish).

## 1.2. The atomistic mode of presentation

It goes without saying that any existing grammar has been written on certain principles which together can be said to form the leitmotif of the entire grammar. In our case it is quite evident that all are based on structuralist principles, where one of the most important principles says that language constitutes a structured whole in which everything is tied together. This leading principle of structuralism is not, however, reflected in traditional grammars. In other words, the verbal categories of tense, aspect, and mood might be described in the same structuralist feature framework, but you will not find the description that tells you how the three verbal categories form a structured whole and how they are tied together. In general, the different parts of the Russian language are described in isolation and without internal coherence. Not only verbal, but also nominal categories such as gender, animacy, number and case are described as if they had no relation to one another - as if they did not exhibit any hierarchical relations whatsoever. The reader is not told - neither explicitly nor implicitly by order of presentation - whether aspect operates on tense or vice versa and which category is the basic one. In the same way the reader is not informed about the lexical-grammatical structure of verbs and nouns, and where lexical meaning could fit in a grammatical description. The order of presentation seems to be governed by the pedagogical principle of simplicity: what appears to be simple comes at first, what appears to be complicated comes at the end. In  that  way  aspect,  which  is  considered  to  be  the  most  complicated category, may be treated as the final category (cf. Mathiassen 1990) - an order of presentation which makes sense only from the point of view of the layman, not from the point of view of the Russian language.

## 1.3. The firm belief in Universal Grammar

Modern linguists from the theories of Government and Binding across Functional  Grammar  to  Cognitive  Linguistics  believe  in  what  is normally called Universal Grammar (UG). According to this view all languages are grounded on the same basic structures and principles, are concrete manifestations of something invariant. The ultimate goal of linguistics is to account for UG and to describe and explain the various paths  that  can  be  taken  by  various  languages.  Although  the  three linguistic schools just mentioned have not yet created a total description of a single language from A to Z, the same underlying idea is found in ordinary  grammars.  From  the  very  descriptions  and  their  conceptual apparatus it appears that grammarians take the Latin language (or the English language in a more extreme variant) as a kind of standard. The result is that the English and Russian tense-aspect-mood systems are described on the same basis. This leaves almost no room for differences between  these  two  languages  -  contrastive  analyses  are  kept  at  a minimum  and  often  constrained  to  ad-hoc  explanations.  The  heavy reliance on the old Latin tradition may also explain why only purely linguistic knowledge is taken as a possible framework of explanation. Neither extralinguistic knowledge (e.g. social rules) or interdisciplinary knowledge (e.g. psycholinguistic experiments) are taken into account.

## 1.4. The primacy of written sources

As  already  pointed  out,  traditional  grammars  are  not  only  oriented towards the interpretive function, but also composed on the basis of samples of data taken from written sources. The data chosen, which are often picked out with great care from the very best authors of the last quarter of the 19th century, are necessarily grammatical, acceptable and appropriate. The one-sided, but quite understandable emphasis on wellknown  and  generally accepted material has several interrelated consequences.  First  of  all,  this  type  of  grammar  will  not  include examples  from  ordinary  oral  discourse  -  data  which  often  differ  in several  respects  from  data  from  written  discourse  and  which  often would be more helpful for the student learning the foreign language. Secondly, this type of grammar operates - if it operates at all - with an extremely  vaguely  defined  distinction  between  grammaticality  and ungrammaticality - as if it was no concern of the grammar to explain why, when and in what way a sentence can be said to be grammatical or ungrammatical. This is of course necessary if the grammar is to reflect the grammar possessed by people who have the language as their first language.

## 2. The new approach in theory

## 2.1. The interpretive and predictive function of a grammar

There  is  a  significant  difference  between  a  grammar  that  interprets utterances and a grammar that produces utterances. As just indicated, when a grammar interprets utterances from written discourse, they will be  grammatical,  acceptable  and  appropriate.  When  a  grammar  is  to produce  an  utterance,  it  must  adopt  the  speaker's  position.  In  other words,  it  must  account  for  the  possibilities  of  selection  and  for  the choice of grammatical forms in terms of the speaker's intentions, the knowledge  derivable  from  the  external  situation  or  setting,  and  the background  knowledge  of  the  hearer,  as  well  as  the  relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Thus, it does not necessarily follow that an interpretively adequate grammar is productively adequate, too. It is not necessarily capable of  distinguishing  grammatical  and ungrammatical,  acceptable  and  unacceptable,  and  appropriate  and inappropriate outputs. (I here follow Hymes 1971 to a certain extent; for other views see Robin Lakoff 1977, van Dijk 1977, and Chomsky 1965:11ff.) A productively oriented grammar takes a certain intention as  input  and  yields  an  utterance  as  output.  In  other  words,  speech production takes the form of a deductive inference:

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A grammar which is interpretively as  well  as  productively  adequate should thus adopt the three way distinction presented above and should be  capable  of  defining  why  and  when  an  utterance  or  a  text  is ungrammatical (which has something to do with its external relation to reality  as  well  as  with  its  internal  relation  to  other  utterances), unacceptable (which  has  something  to  do  with  its  relation  to  the hearer), or inappropriate (which has something to do with its relation to the speaker, i.e. his intention).

## 2.2. The holistic approach

It goes without saying that we need a psychological component in order to be able to talk about intentions and we need some tools to describe how  intentions  are  formed  and  in  which  sort  of  language  they  are encoded.  Since  GB-theory  sees  no  distinction  whatsoever  between linguistic  grammar  and  mental  grammar,  i.e.  between  language  and mind, and since Cognitive Linguistics identifies apperception (involving  all  senses)  with  perception  (involving  only  the  sense  of vision), there is really no help to find in linguistics. I believe that there is a universal mental language which has its own grammar - the mental grammar of the human mind. All other things being equal, people are borne  with  the  same  cognitive  abilities  which  are  evoked  during childhood  in  much  the  same  way  regardless  of  speech  community membership.  The  universal  mental  grammar  is  viewed  as  involving three different levels of representation. In other words, according to this view  the  same  part  of  reality  is  represented  in  three  different  ways corresponding to the three different levels. It is thus the child's coupling of data with either of the three levels of mental representation that is responsible for the different types of grammar. Let me briefly examine what I consider to form the basic structure of the human mind. We shall take  our  point  of  departure  in  two  different  types  of  situation:  (1) simple situations , i.e. states and activities , and (2) complex situations , i.e. events and processes . The two simple situations are identified on a perceptual basis - activities evoke unstable pictures, but states do not in opposition to the complex situations, viz. events and processes which cannot be identified on a perceptual basis. I define an event as a change of state caused by an activity and a process as an activity intending to  cause  a  change  of  state .  As  we  see,  an  event  and  a  process  are exactly made up by the two simple situations, i.e. by an activity and a state.

## 2.2.1. The structure of the human mind

## The first level: Identification

All people can identify an event, i.e. a state (q) caused by an activity (p), without  having  seen  the  activity  itself.  It  is  enough  to  have  at  your disposal  two  opposite  pieces  of  information  about  the  same  thing/person (ground) in order to identify an event. If you know that there is nothing on your table (¬ q) and then suddenly see a vase with flowers standing on the very same table (q), then you will know that this cannot be true in the same world. Therefore you will conclude that the state situation 'there is nothing on the table' (¬ q) is true of a past world, whereas the state situation 'there is a vase with flowers on the table' (q) is true of a present world. In fact you have identified a change of state caused by some activity since you know that no change of state (i.e. from ¬ q to q) can take place without it having been caused by some activity  (cf.  von  Wright  1974).  This  is  all  done  automatically  and subconsciously on the basis of what I call the event-instruction  (see fig.1). An event is thus identified and experienced indirectly without you seeing the activity itself. You may also identify a process, i.e. an activity (p) intending to cause a new state (q). A process is experienced forwards, since you must see an activity in order to be able to infer that there is a certain intention underlying the production of that activity. This  is  done  on  the  basis  of  receiving  an  unstable  picture  on  your perceptual screen. Let us imagine that you see your mother carrying a vase  with  flowers.  You  identify  an  activity  by  receiving  an  unstable picture. But this is not enough to identify a process. You have to be able to see that your mother is walking towards a certain table and conclude from this background that she has the intention of putting the flowers on the table. This need not turn out to be true in view of the fact that she may turn left and put them on the window sill instead. But if it turns out to be true then the identified proces becomes an event which is directly experienced.  This  means  that  the  event  instruction  gives  a  correct output in all cases, whereas the process instruction does not garantee a correct output: it involves an abductive element, i.e. pure guessing.

Fig.1: The 'skeletal' structure of the human mind

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| level one: the level of instructions identification   | level one: the level of instructions identification   |
|-------------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------|
| process instruction if p and ◊ q, then p FIN q        | event instruction if q and ¬ q, then p CAUS q         |
| level two: the level of mental models assimilation    | level two: the level of mental models assimilation    |
| process model <prod x >p ∧ <intend α >(p -3 q)        | event model <prod x > p ∧ (p -3 q)                    |
| level three: the level of stores storimg              | level three: the level of stores storimg              |
| past world store x produced p-and-q                   | present world store q because of p-and-q              |

## The second level: Assimilation

Now  the  identified  event  or  process  has  to  be  assimilated,  i.e. interiorized into the human mind. The assimilation is provided by the mental models of events and processes (cf. fig.1). Such mental models, which are generalized, abstract copies of concrete events and processes of reality, must exist because without them we could not account for the fact that in the case of an identified event an unobserved past activity suddenly  becomes  part  of  our  human  mind  and  in  the  case  of  an identified  process  it  is  an  unobservable  future  state  that  suddenly becomes part of our human mind in the shape of an imagined state. We cannot possibly explain this without assuming that people have at their disposal  generalized  copies  of  these  complex  situations,  i.e.  mental models of events and processes. In other words, at the level of mental models identified events and processes - of which you have actually seen only one of two parts - are internalized into the human mind as complete structures.

## The third level: Storing

After  having  assimilated  an  identified  event  or  an  identified  process people must store them in order to be able to assimilate new events and processes and in order to be able to recall or visualize them, and to talk about them later on. From the point of view of normal human abilities at  least  two different kinds of mental stores must be available to the human mind: one of the past world and another of the present world. This must be the case since people are capable of differentiating past experiences which have no present effects and those which have. For instance,  If  we  stick  to  the  flower-scene  and  presume  that  you  have experienced the event indirectly, i.e. identified it backwards, you know that the state situation 'there is a vase with flowers on the table' obtains in the present world, whereas the activity that lead to the present state does not obtain anymore, i.e. it is, and will always be in the past. The event can and will only be stored as a photograph in the present world store - you have not seen the activity which would have left a film in the past world store. If the event was directly experienced, i.e. identified as a process which later turns into an event, then you will have it stored as a film in the past world store - you actually saw the activity component - but also as a photograph in the present world store, because the state situation 'there is a vase with flowers on the table' still obtains. When the vase is removed, the flowers thrown out or the vase is broken, the photograph in question will be 'burnt': the original situation is gone and therefore the copy taken from the original has to be removed from the present world store to the past world store.

The important and interesting thing about this is that the three levels reflect three different mental representations of the very same event and process:  (1)  at  the  level  of  instructions  people  identify  events  or processes either directly or indirectly; (2) at the level of mental models people  assimilate  or  interiorize  the  identified  event  and  process  by using the mental models of events and processes, respectively; and (3) at the level of stores people store the assimilated events and processes in the present and past world stores, respectively. It it my hypothesis that languages may choose to verbalize either of these three levels of mental  representation.  In  other  words,  a  language  may  choose  to verbalize  what  has  been  directly  and  indirectly  experienced,  or  to verbalize the mental models which are generalized copies of reality or to  verbalize  the  past  and  present  world  stores.  Whatever  a  language chooses to do, the grammatical outcome will be quite distinct from the other two possibilities.

## 2.2.2. Linguistic functions and linguistic supertypes

If  we  compare  these  three  established  levels  of  the  human  mind  to Bühler's Organon Model (cf. Bühler 1933), it appears that there is a clear connection (see fig. 2). Bühler operates only with three so-called language functions in opposition to Jakobson and Halliday who operated with up to seven different functions thus - as I see it - confusing the  notion  of  language  function  with  the  notion  of  speech  function. Each function is attached to one of the three obligatory participants of any communication situation, viz. the speaker who has a message, the hearer for whom the information is intended and objects and situations of reality which can be said to be carried by the linguistic notions of words and sentences. The expressive function is thus defined in relation to the speaker, the appeal function in relation to the hearer and the representative  function in  relation  to  external  reality.  The  three language  functions  correspond  not  only  to  the  three  traditionally recognized sign types, viz. symptom, signal and symbol (cf.fig.2), but also  to  the  hierarchical  structure  of  the  human  mind  just  examined above (cf. fig.1). Thus, on the basis of Bühler's Organon Model (1933)

and on the basis of the three levels of representation (for further information, see Durst-Andersen 1992: 81-96) I suggest that the grammatical  categories  of  any  single  language  and  their  formal  coding  are designed to capture primarily one of the following: (1) the speaker's encoding  of  message,  (2)  the  information  which  is  intended  for  the hearer  and  which  is  decoded  by  the  hearer,  or  (3)  situations  in referential reality which are represented in the hearer as well as in the speaker.  This  yields  three  linguistic  supertypes:  (1) speaker-based languages like  Georgian  and  Turkish  (level  one),  (2) hearer-based languages like English and Danish (level three), and (3) reality-based languages like Russian and the informal version of French (level two). Each such supertype has its  own  core  category  -  speaker-based  languages have a mood distinction between direct and indirect experience, hearer-based  languages  have  a  tense  distinction  between  flash-back (old information) and news-flash (new information), and reality-based languages have an aspectual distinction between events and processes (see fig.3). Each core category which determines the entire core system, thereby  creating  internal  harmony  among  its  members.  The  internal harmony is not only argued to be a fact inside other verbal categories, but also inside nominal categories because the nominal system appears to be isomorphic with respect to the verbal one (see below). If this holds true, then we have an explanation of the fact that when looking at the grammatical categories of the Russian and the English languages it is not possible to find a single common category - it is either the case that a category is present in one language (e.g. definite and indefinite article in English or case in Russian), but absent in the other, or the case that a category in one language (e.g. aspect, tense, and mood in English) is completely different from that of the other language - i.e. what seems to be the same because they have the same name cannot be put under the same heading and therefore do not fit into the same structure (see also Durst-Andersen 1993/94).

Fig.3: The three linguistic supertypes

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## Supertypes and form vs. substance

Although the notion of linguistic supertype is new, it appears that the idea of making a distinction between type (supertype in my terminology) and system is not new at all. In 1965 Coseriu proposed a tetratomy of language, i.e. a four-way distinction, which included type, system, norm, and speech (cf.  Coseriu 1965). By so doing, Coseriu split the Saussurian notion langue and the Hjelmslevian notion form into three parts: (1) type which has something to do with principles of organization, (2) system which is the materialization of some more or less abstract principles into rules , and (3) norm which is the normal realization of the rules. This means that some principles can be organised or weighed differently and the result will be different systems, and in the same way a certain system, which is in fact something potential, can manifest itself in many ways, but one of them is the normal one. Let us say that is possible to distinguish between consonantal and vocalic languages (cf. Andersen 1978), i.e. between two different types. Russian and Polish would be consonantal languages because they both have the largest  number  of  phonological  distinctions  inside  the  consonants. Their phonological systems are, however, different, since the interpretation  of  the  principles  have  resulted  in  different  rules.  The  Russian system has several manifestations - i-kan'e vs. je-kan'e, a-kan'e vs. okan'e, etc. - where it is possible to find the normal realization (which is i-kan'e and a-kan'e). The norm can only be found by looking at the substance, i.e. speech in Coseriu's terminology. In other words, at the substance level Saussure's notion parole equals Coseriu's speech .

From this the conclusion to be drawn is that although two languages belong  to  the  same  linguistic  supertype  (or  type  in  Coseriu's  terminology), they may manifest themselves in two different systems. In the former case we are dealing with identical principles, in the latter case we are dealing with different interpretations which result in different rules. By looking at a particular system of a specific linguistic supertype (e.g. Russian as a member of reality-based languages) and by comparing  it  with  a  specific  system  of  another  linguistic  supertype  (e.g. English as a member of hearer-based languages), we automatically get a contrastive element. In other words, the proposed theory of linguistic supertypes  is  a  holistic  typology  which  ensures  that  it  is  the  entire system of L 2 that is compared to the entire system of L 1 . This is crucial, since  only  in  that  way  it  will  be  possible  to  convey  the  'biological nature' of the language to foreign students. (For a 'total-grammatical' approach, see Hawkins 1986 and Müller-Gotoma 1992.)

## 3. The new approach in practice

## 3.1. Word-for-word vs. sentence-for-sentence translation

Let us take an illustrative example and let us test how this kind of grammar  operates.  Let  us  imagine  that  some  Danish  students  have  been assigned  the  task  of  translating  the  short  story  'Buketten'  by  Leck Fischer into Russian. The first sentence to be translated is the following:

- (1) Der blev banket på døren 'There was a knocking at the door.' there-adv knock-pas-pret on door-def

From my own experience as both a student and a teacher of Russian I know that the Danish student will not have the faintest idea of what to do with that sentence: there is no grammar and there is no dictionary that might be helpful. He will probably start by taking the dictionary and try to look under the entry der 'there'; make some inquiries about passives in a Russian grammar; once again look into the dictionary to get some help to translate the preposition på 'on'; and finally consult the grammar again to find the exact case form to be used in the given utterance. This approach where the student analyses and translates in components, i.e. word for word, is completely wrong from the point of view of the Russian language - one might argue that it actually jumps over  the  Russian  grammar.  As  a  reality-based  language,  Russian  is designed to  capture  situations  in  reality.  In  view  of  the  fact  that  the Danish language is designed to capture the information intended for the hearer, the student has to imagine which situation he thinks is referred to by (1), i.e. he has to choose one of several interpretations corresponding to different situations. The Danish student would be able to arrive at the 'relevant' interpretation by deciding on the following variables :

- -Type of situation (state, activity or action)? → activity verb ( stuc ˇat' )
- -Presentation of the activity (act, process or event)? → event ( pf )
- -Past or present activity? → past activity (l )
- -Duration of activity itself (short, too long, without interruption)? → short ( po -)
- -Individuation of agent (agent specification or not)? → none (i )
- -Is it permanent or is sporadic contact? → sporadic ( acc )
- -Is the activity vertically or horizontrally directed? → vertically ( v )

All these question should be asked and answered in order to arrive at the  Russian  utterance  which  can  be  said  to  match  the  most  likely interpretation of the Danish utterance in the given context. In that way we get (1').

- (1') Po-stuc ˇa-l-i v dver'-Ø pf-knock/ACT-pret-plur in door-acc

The Russian utterance has the following semantics: 'Somebody who is not important to our story went from producing two or three knocks at a  vertically  placed  door  to  not  producing  knocks'.  As  should  be evident,  although  in  principle  the  Russian  utterance  talks  about  the same situation as the original Danish utterance, they cannot be said to be a hundred percent identical in meaning - on the contrary. The Danish language  acts  as  an  appeal  to  the  hearer/reader  and  is  designed  to capture  the  distinction  between  new  and  old  information  at  various levels. Der 'there'  signals  a  so-called  presentative  sentence,  i.e. introduces a new frame of reference (a new story or a new part of an old story), the simple past form shows that this part of the story is presented as  a  flash-back,  and  the blive -passive that it  is  shown  as  a  film  (not presented  as  information  bites).  Note  that  the  Danish  utterance  says nothing about the activity component. It could be a single act, two or three  knocks  or  in  principle  an  ongoing  knocking  activity.  Only  the reader  or  the  hearer  can  decide  what  it  looked  like.  In  other  words, external reality is treated as something that the reader has to construct for himself - in direct contrast to the Russian language.

## 3.2. Translation and interdisciplinary knowledge

If we go a little bit further down the text it turns out that some person had  come  to  deliver  some  flowers  to  Mrs.  Elly.  These  flowers  are however received by her husband. At the point where he shouts to her that the flowers are for her, we realize that it is not sufficient for the student to have the 'valid' grammar, he must also possess knowledge about social rules of the Russian society and be capable of applying textlinguistic notions:

- (2) 'De er til dig'. Hun afbrød ikke arbejdet 'They are for you! - She (Mrs.Elly) didn't stop her work.'

The question is how to translate the negated utterance. Normally it is recommended  by  Russian  grammars  that  the  imperfective  aspect should be used when the potential agent did not do anything. I made an experiment  with  Russian  native  speakers  who  master  the  Danish language in which I asked them to translate the negated utterance. First I  did  not  show  them  the  continuation  of  the  text.  All  chose  the perfective  aspect  and  said  that  the  imperfective  sentence  would  be ungrammatical:

- (3) On-a ne prerva-l-a svoj-u rabot-u

she-nom neg stop/pf-pret-fem her-acc work-acc

Then I showed them the entire text where it is stated that Mrs. Elly did not stop her work because she did not want to receive the flowers - her husband had sent them in order to calm her down (he had been fooling around with another woman). At that point they all changed opinion and said that the perfective sentence was ungrammatical. Why did they change their opinion? In the first case they chose on the basis of their knowledge of social rules. When women are brought flowers, they are supposed to behave according to the rule saying that they should stop whatever they are doing in order to be able to receive the flowers - the opposite would be impolite. In other words, it was presupposed that Mrs. Elly was obligated to stop her work. This specific type of presupposition  can  be  conveyed  only  by  the  perfective  aspect.  When  the Russian informants realized that she in fact did not want to receive the flowers,  they  changed  opinion  because  only  the  imperfective  aspect implies that the potential agent did not want to do anything (see 3a).

(3a) Ona ne preryvala (ipf) svoju rabotu.

A normal grammar which does not operate with social rules, expectations and textlinguistic notions would not be able to handle this kind of data.

## 3.3. Semantically different, but pragmatically identical

Although languages belong to different supertypes, it does not necessarily follow that it is totally impossible to bring differently constructed grammars under the same heading. Let us take an illustative example. In Russian there are a perfective as well as an imperfective imperative which are used to issue MANDS at the expence of indirect speech acts, which are used far more often in Danish than in Russian, but in Danish  less  frequently  than  in  English,  where  in  most  cases  direct speech acts would imply something like a military command (e.g. Sit!, Go!, Get up!, etc.). These differences have something to do with the fact that Russian, on the one hand, and English and Danish on the other, are grounded on a completely different semantic basis (they belong to different supertypes), and with the fact that English and Danish are different manifestations of the same supertype, i.e. have different rules although founded on the same principles (for a cultural explanation, see Wierzbicka  1991).  However,  by  looking  at  various  parameters  at  a higher level it is possible to find correlations and make them fit into the same pragmatic framework. In that way it turns out that it is possible to describe (a) the use of aspect in connection with the Russian imperative mood, (b) the use of Danish 'modalizers' (i.e. modal particles) in connection with imperative sentences, and (c) the use of indirect speech acts in English (see fig.4). From the pragmatically defined conditions inside what is here called 'The Instructions for Directives' it appears that the major condition is whether the speaker considers the hearer to be cooperative or not. If he decides YES (either because the hearer desires  the  same  state  as  the  speaker  does  or  because  he  wants  to  be helpful with regard to the speaker's desire), the speaker must decide whether it is true or false that the hearer dares to produce the required activity. If he decides YES, he will use the perfective aspect in Russian, the LIGE-particle in Danish, and 'Will you...?' in English. If he decides  NO,  then  he  will  use  the  imperfective  aspect  in  Russian,  the BARE-particle in Danish, and 'Won't you...?' in English. If the speaker decides that the hearer is not cooperative (because the hearer hesitates to perform the requested activity), he must decide whether it is true or false that the hearer desires the same state as he does. If he decides  YES,  he  will  use  the  perfective  aspect  with  the  z ˇe-particle  in Russian, the NU-particle in Danish, and 'Can't you...!' in English. If he decides NO (i.e. the hearer hesitates to produce the activity, simply because he does not desire the state which will obtain if he produces the activity), he will use the imperfective aspect with the the z ˇe-particle in Russian, the SÅ -particle in Danish, and 'Will you...!' in English. It appears  that  Russian  distinguishes  between  deontic  and  alethic  modality  by  means  of  aspect  and  between  polite  and  impolite  uses  by means of particle and/or intonation, that Danish distinguishes between the various deontic and alethic modes by means of different particles ('modalizers'), and English distinguishes between polite and impolite uses  by  means  of  'sentence  mode'  -  interrogative  sentences  sig- nalling  politeness,  whereas  declarative  sentences  with  inversion  of subject-predicate signal impoliteness.

Fig.4: Instructions for Directives

Although  different  social  rules  may  interfere  and  cause  some  local mismatches in the above-mentioned correlations, it ought to be clear that  we  have  some  simple  tools  to  make  foreign  speakers  learn  to produce grammatical utterances which are simultaneously appropriate from the point of view of the speaker, as well as acceptable from the point of view of the hearer.

## 3.4. Scenario descriptions and oral discourse

Another  way  of  making  the  grammar  more  suited  to  satisfy  the predictive function of a grammar is to use scenario descriptions where the student/reader has to choose the utterance that fits the description:

Scenario description 1: The hospital scene

An old lady is standing in front of a couple of chairs in a hospital hall and is not sure if she may sit down as she wants. You, who are a doctor, passes her and observes her uncertainty. In order to make her sit down you say:

- (4a) Sæt Dem lige ned! SIT YOU JUST DOWN
- (4b) Sæt Dem nu ned! SIT YOU NOW DOWN
- (4c) Sæt Dem så ned! SIT YOU THEN DOWN
- (4d) Sæt dem bare ned! SIT YOU MERELY DOWN

If we assume that the task was given to a student who chose the right one, viz. (4d), he might have explained it in the following way. In the situation described there is really no choice in Danish, simply because all  examples  from  (a)  to  (c)  will  imply  that  they  are  uttered  in  the doctor's  own  interest,  which  is  wrong  according  to  the  scenario description. Only (d) makes sense: the old lady needs a permission from a  person  who  has  the  right  authority  and  (d)  with bare involves  the necessary  licence  and  is  uttered  in  the  interest  of  the  old  lady. Bare 'merely' is thus a prescriptive modalizer, the function of which is to issue a permission and by doing that to satisfy the hearer's precondition for complying with the speaker's request. Such scenario descriptions will not only help the student to produce speech, but at the same time ensure  that  we  do  not  forget  oral  communication  and  oral  language (which is so poorly represented in ordinary grammars).

## 4. The grammar itself - evidence from Russian

One of the advantages of relying on the notion of linguistic supertype is that  we  can  explain  why,  for  instance,  the  Russian  and  English  languages do not have a single category in common. Russian has aspect, but  it  differs  fundamentally  from  English  aspect  (the  difference  be- tween the perfective and imperfective aspect is learnt by the Russian child in the past tense, whereas the difference between the progressive and non-progressive aspect is learnt by the English child in the present); Russian has tense, but it differs fundamentally from English tense in the sense that Russian tense talks about past or present situations, while English tense talks about past and present worlds, i.e. people/things are located  in  two  different  kinds  of  universe;  etc.  In  addition  to  that, Russian has a whole arsenal of formalized categories which are simply absent in English (e.g. case, animacy, mood, etc.) just as the English language has (e.g. definiteness, it- and there-sentences, it- and therecleft  sentences,  etc.).  In  the  same  way,  it  becomes  clear  why  it  is difficult - if not impossible - for Russian students to learn to speak and write correct English as well as to comprehend oral and written English discourse, and, conversely, for English students to learn to speak and write  correct  Russian  as  well  as  to  comprehend  oral  and  written discourse. By saying - as we did above - that there is a determining category, i.e. a category that governs the entire system, we automatically get the idea that some categories are more important than others. This is, of course, extremely important for acquiring a second language and should be reflected in any grammar. This brings us to the question of the hierarchical organization of verbal and nominal categories and to the question of isomorphism between the structure of the verbal and the nominal systems.

## 4.1. The verbal categories and their internal structure

In 2.1. we talked about state (q-classifiers), activity (p-classifiers) and action verbs (p-and-q-classifiers). Normally they are called verb classes or aktionsarten outside the Russian tradition. Without going into further detail  I  shall  say  that  these  three  classes  comprise  an  important grammatical category which has been overlooked so far. The function of this verbal category can be said to be equivalent to gender and for that reason I shall call it verbal gender (VG). In this way, the Russian language can be said to have three verbal genders - state verbs which create a single ground-proposition involving a state description, activity verbs which create a single ground-proposition involving an activity description, and action verbs which create two ground-propositions one  involving  an  activity  description  and  another  involving  a  state description. Due to the fact that state and activity verbs involve single ground-propositions,  but  action  verbs  two  ground-propositions  the former  can  be  termed simplex  verbs and  the  latter complex verbs . What is then the function of verbal gender? Its function is best understood in metaphorical terms. It can be said to create an IMAGE-IDEA PAIR , i.e. something potential which has not yet been actualized and reached  the  real  world.  For  instance,  both  the  perfective  and  imperfective  action  verb dat' (pf)/ davat' (ipf)  'give'  create  two  ideas  in  the form of two ground-propositions, viz. X DO SOMETHING (p) and Y EXIST WITH Z (q), both being coupled to two corresponding images one being unstable where X is doing something with Y and another being stable where Y is with Z. In that way we get a complex IMAGEIDEA PAIR or a verb model of actions . The common meaning of the two aspectual forms in Russian is therefore not to be found in an autonomous component like the English verb 'to give', but in the common root // da //-. Aspect (A) operates on the output structure of the category of verbal gender, and by doing that it can be said to create a copy of reality. An action as such is not found in reality: it is not possible to find a world where the activity of the action 'X BRING Y TO Z' obtains at the same time as does the state of the action - either it must be the case that X did something that caused Y to be with Z (an event), or it must be the case that X is doing something in order to cause Y to be with Z (a process). This means that an action is a construct or a metaconcept of events and processes - just as it is not possible to find a human being as such: it will either be a male or a female variant. In other words, aspect brings reality into the picture and therefore we should no longer speak about X and Y, but about concrete human beings as Grigorij and things as a certain book. The function of the perfective aspect is to show to the hearer  a  concrete  copy  of  an  event,  whereas  the  function  of  the imperfective aspect is to show a copy of a process (an action cannot create a copy at all because there is no original in our external reality). The category of tense (T)  operates  on  the  output  structure  of  aspect (copy) and by doing so places the original in reality, i.e. either before or simultaneously with the moment of speech. The category of mood (M) operates  on  the  output  structure  of  tense  (original)  and  by  doing  so assigns the relation of equality or non-equality between the copy and the original. Indicative assigns the relation of equality and thus indicates  that  we  are  dealing  with  true  reference,  i.e  according  to  the speaker  there  is  or  was  such  a  situation  in  reality.  The  two  non- indicative  forms  assign  the  relation  of  non-equality.  The  subjunctive mood treats the lack of equality as a matter of fact, i.e. it cannot be changed. The imperative mood treats it as matter to be changed, i.e. the hearer is asked by the speaker to create an original on the basis of the copy (see fig.5).

| COPY   | RELATION   | ORIGINAL   |
|--------|------------|------------|
| ASPECT | MOOD       | TENSE      |

This is the best way to explain the hierarchical structure and internal functioning of the system of verbal categories in Russian. It shows that verbal gender is a lexico-grammatical category, that aspect is a propositional-semantic category, that tense is a referential-semantic category and that mood is a relational-semantic category. This hierarchical structure  is  iconically  reflected  in  the  segmentational  structure  of morphemes:

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

## 4.2. The nominal categories and their internal structure

The point is that the structure of the nominal system is isomorphic with respect  to  the  structure  of  the  verbal  system  -  the  former  is  a diagrammatization  of  the  latter.  This  means  that  the  four  verbal categories mentioned above have their exact equivalents in the nominal system. Thus it seems to be no coincidence that the Russian language consists of four verbal categories as well as four nominal categories, viz. gender (NG), animacy (A), number (N) and case (C). A look at the order of the involved nominal morphemes should provide us with an idea of the hierachical structure on the level of content:

<!-- formula-not-decoded -->

Just as verbal gender and verbal aspect, nominal gender and animacy inherently belong to the stem, whereas the remaining two categories belong  to  morphological  endings. Nominal  gender also  creates  an IMAGE-IDEA PAIR, i.e. in the case of e.g. mys ˇ 'mouse' we will have a prototypical description of a 'mouse' paired to a protypical picture of a  'mouse'. Nominal gender is thus a lexico-grammatical category . The  function  of  the  category  of animacy can  be  compared  to  the function of verbal aspect, since it operates on the output structure of gender and by so doing shows the hearer a concrete copy of a 'mouse' - in the case of an animate mouse the hearer is shown a normal living mouse (see 7a), in the case of an inanimate mouse (see 7b) the hearer is shown a computer mouse.

- (7a) ja uvidel dvux mys ˇej 'I saw two (genuine) mice'. I see-pf-pret two-gen-pl mouse-gen-pl
- (7b) ja uvidel dve mys ˇi
- 'I saw two (computer) mice'.

I see-pf-pret two-acc-pl mouse-acc-pl

The former will create a potentially unstable copy ('agentiveness'), the latter  will  create  a  stable  copy  ('passiveness').  In  other  words,  the category of animacy/inanimacy could be termed an ideational-semantic category . The category of number operates on the output structure of the category of animacy and by so doing it places the original (for instance, two mice) in reality. In that respect its function is comparable to  that  of  tense  and  can  be  named  a referential-semantic category . Case is equivalent to mood and is thus a relational-semantic category in  the  sense  that  it  shows  the  hearer  whether  there  is  a  relation  of equality or not between the copy showed by the category of animacy and the original placed in reality by the category of number (see fig.6).

| COPY    | RELATION   | ORIGINAL   |
|---------|------------|------------|
| ANIMACY | CASE       | NUMBER     |

Direct cases, i.e. the nominative and accusative cases, function as the direct mood form, viz. the indicative form. They assign the relation of equality and thus signal that the person or thing denoted by the noun is indeed present in the situation described by the verb (I call this local reference ). All other cases are oblique and assign lack of equality. The vocative case, which is included in the Russian case system because of its productivity (cf. Bily ! 1990), functions as the imperative mood: it treats  the  lack  of  equality  as  matter  to  be  changed,  whereas  the  remaining three cases (the genitive, dative and instrumental cases) treat the lack of equality as a matter of fact. The difference between them seems  to  correspond  to  the  distinction  between  objective  mood  (the genitive) and subjective mood (the dative and the instrumental).

The  grammar  just  described  is  capable  of  explaining  what  is inexplicable in ordinary grammars (if mentioned at all): in Russian we have to use the subjunctive mood in connection with the genitive case in the following utterance (the indicative mood will be ungrammatical):

- (8) Na Ukraine net ni odnogo goroda (gen), kotoryj ne golodal by (subjunctive) vo vremja vojny 'There is no town (gen) that did not suffer (subjunctive) from hunger during World War Two.'

We can explain this phenomenon as a kind of harmony : because there is no local reference the genitive case is obligatory and by opening up an internal world of imagination, the speaker must continue to speak in the same terms and therefore has to choose the subjunctive mood which also  assigns  the  relation  of  non-equality  between  the  copy  and  the original. The distinction between local and non-local reference inside the Russian case system is also found in the pronominal system where pronouns with to and nic ˇego assign local reference, whereas pronouns with nibud' and nec ˇego assign non-local reference.

## 3.3. Lexicon - grammar - communication: nom. vs. instr.

As  already  pointed  out,  ordinary  grammars  only  seldomly  mention lexical  meaning.  This  is  a  pity,  since  a  certain  grammatical  way  of thinking must reveal itself at all levels of language - also at the level of lexicon.  Let  me  illustrate  this  by  using  the  category  of  animacy  vs. inanimacy, which plays a far more important role in the Russian language than normally acknowledged by grammarians. The grammatical distinction is instantiated in the lexicon as two different words for the English word corpse , viz. mertvec 'animate' and trup 'inanimate'. At an  even  higher  level  of  abstraction  the  grammatical  and  lexical distinction can be explained in religious terms: according to orthodox religious thinking the soul leaves the human body only after 40 days. This creates the need for two different kinds of the notion 'corpse'. Owing  to  the  exclusion  of  lexical  meaning,  traditional  grammars actually  have  nothing  substantial  to  say  about  the  combination  of lexical and grammatical meaning. This phenomenon seems to be rather important,  since,  for  instance,  (9a)  is  grammatical,  while  (9b)  is ungrammatical.

- (9a) On-Ø  by-l-Ø  orël-Ø 'He was an eagle' (i.e. extremely good). human-M be-pret-M eagle-nom-sg
- (9b) *On-Ø  by-l-Ø  orl-om 'He was an eagle' (i.e. a certain bird). pron-M be-pret-M eagle-instr

This is strange, because normally both forms are equally grammatical. The point is, of course, that the instrumental case categorizes the man as an eagle, which is impossible when we are dealing with all normal worlds and - I emphasize - this is what grammars do and should do. In a normal world a male person is a human being and not an animal of a certain kind. This means that in a non-normal world where a certain person  participates  in  a  carneval  fancilly  dressed  as  an  eagle  the utterance (9b) becomes grammatical (this is the only kind context that can make it grammatical - I thank Michael Herslund for having made this observation). The nominative case characterizes him as an eagle, i.e.  says  that  he  is  a  person  who  has  the  quality  of  an  eagle.  This  is possible, since it involves only the connotative aspects of the noun. In other examples it is not the question of grammaticality, but rather the question of acceptability (see 10 and 11).

- (10) †On-Ø  by-l-Ø  datc ˇanin-om 'He was a Dane'. pron-M be-pret-M Dane-instr
- (11) †Pu ˇskin-Ø  by-l-Ø  poét-om 'Pushkin was a poet'. Pushkin-M be-pret-M poet-instr

In other words, both examples are grammatical - there is nothing wrong about  what  they  denote  -  nevertheless  they  sound  odd  and  are  -  if pronounced by foreigners - clearly marked as grammatical mistakes. What  is  at  play?  They  are  both  instances  of  what  I  would  call ' communication-overrules-grammar '.  The  important  thing  is  that the lexical meaning of 'Dane' itself is a categorization of certain persons  and  by  combining  it  with  the  instrumental  case  the  meaning  is brought to the hearer twice. The double categorization makes it sound like a tautology and is unacceptable. That is the reason why in all normal  worlds  you  will  not  hear  utterances  like  (10).  This  has  consequences for the use of the nominative as well: if you want to characterize a person as a Dane, you will have to use the adjective nastojas ˇc ˇij 'real'  together  with  the  nominative case. This means that what is an important distinction inside nouns is blocked inside the case system, but  reappears  on  the  surface  as  something  else.  In  (11)  Pushkin  is categorized as a poet and since this is known to every Russian person, it is felt as being impolite to say such a thing - as if the speaker could not presuppose such knowledge. In this specific case you would normally use the nominative case and in that way bring some new information into the utterance, viz. he was the poet per se . The distinction between  the  nominative  and  instrumental  case  is  also  found  inside adjectives. The semantics is the same, i.e. the nominative case characterizes a person or a thing, whereas the instrumental case categorizes. However, when the adjective functions as a predicative determiner, i.e. when it occurs in a secondary nexus, the distinction in case marking becomes  a  text  linguistic  distinction  between  foregrounding  and backgrounding (see 12 and 13).

- (12) On-a vys ˇ-l-a iz vod-y mokr-aja 'She went wet out of the water'. hum-F go-pret-F out water-gen wet-nom
- (13) On-a vys ˇ-l-a iz vod-y mokr-oj 'She went wet out of the water'. hum-F go-pret-F out water-gen wet-instr

The nominative foregrounds the state situation where the female person is described as being wet, while the instrumental case backgrounds it this  means  that  the  state  situation  where  she  is  out  of  the  water  is foregrounded instead (see also Timberlake 1986). As we can imagine, foregrounding and backgrounding necessarily implies a certain kind of harmony between various parts of information given by the preceding or the following utterance. For instance, it is completely coherent to use the  nominative case in (14), but not completely harmonic to use the instrumental.

- (14) On-Ø  c ˇut' ne umer-Ø  v bol'nic-e, a segodnja on-Ø  vernu-l-sja zdorov-yj/?zdorov-ym hum-M bit not die-pret in hospital-L, but today hum-M returnpret-refl healthy-N/-I

It is stated that a certain person almost died in a hospital and that - what is one way or the other a little bit surprising to the speaker - he returned healthy today. In this case it is more easy to see 'he is almost dead at the hospital' and 'he is healthy now' (i.e. the result of the foregrounding function of the nominative case) as harmonic because they talk about the same topic (to be dead vs. alive), whereas 'he is almost dead at the hospital' and 'he is home now' (i.e. the result of the backgrounding function of the instrumental case) seems to be disharmonic, since the hearer feels that some information is left out (i.e. that he got better and therefore later could take home). The backgrounding function of the instrumental case is evident in (15).

- (15) Ona vys ˇla iz vody mokroj instr (mokraja nom ) i prostudi-l-as' 'She went wet out of the water and cought a cold'

In  (15)  the  nominative  case  would  be  out  of  the  question  -  it  is inappropriate from the point of view of the speaker's message - since it would focus on the information that she is wet thus requiring the focus to be continued in the following discourse (in the shape of a description of  her  looks).  In  contrast  to  this  stands  the  instrumental  case  which backgrounds the information - it is appropriate in the given context. In that way the state where she is wet can function as the reason why she caught a cold, and the entire utterance thus gives the right associations to the hearer (cf. Karaulov 1993).

The same phenomenon  is found in aspectual usage and is documented in an interesting experiment with 100 Russian informants (see  Svedova  1984).  They  were  all  given  one  hundred  utterances including a certain context (either in the shape of a preceding utterance or in the shape of a following one) and were asked to choose aspect, i.e. the  perfective  or  imperfective  aspect.  Let  us  take  the  following utterance as an illustrative example (see 16).

- (16) Éta stat'ja perevedena nebrez ˇno. Kto eë perevël (pf)/perevodil (ipf)?

'This article is very clumsily translated. Who did (pf)/did (ipf) the translation?'

It turned out that 97 pct of the informants marked the perfective aspect ungrammatical, while 3 pct of them found it was grammatical and even more preferable than the corresponding imperfective form. Both forms are  in  fact  grammatical.  This  is  a  question  of  foregrounding  vs. backgrounding  of  information  or  once  again  an  instantiation  of  the phenomenon 'communication-overrules-grammar'. The perfective aspect foregrounds the state 'The translation exists on world-location' and backgrounds the activity 'Somebody produced an activity with that intention'.  Since  the  passive  sentence  asserts  that  the  translation  is clumsy and thereby presupposes the physical existence of the translation itself, the result is that there is mismatch in the information packaging. If something appears to be presupposed in a preceding affirmative  utterance  and  against  this  background  is  asserted  (i.e.  foregrounded) in the following question, we get a tautological statement inside the question and the perfective aspect is judged ill-sounding - we feel that we are not getting further, but have stepped back. There is too much harmony between the two utterances. The imperfective utterance shifts  topic,  i.e.  it  introduces  the  question  of  a  translator  by  foregrounding the activity description and in that way introduces something new so that the hearer will feel that we in a way are getting further.

## 4. Concluding remarks

I  have  just  attempted  to  outline  the  fundamentals  of  a  new  type  of grammar,  called Mental  Grammar ,  which  operates  with  a  sharp distinction between language, mind, and reality. It rejects the existence of UG by splitting it up into three different linguistic supertypes . On the background of various unexplained data from the Russian language, which is a so-called reality-based language, I tried to demonstrate that such  type  of  grammar  lives  more  up  to  what  was  called  modern standards than previous grammars which are oriented only towards the hearer,  rely  almost  totally  on  written  sources,  and  lack  a  contrastive element.

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