Sentence structure diagram vs typical meaning as a linguo-didactic phenomenon

Abstract

In modern syntax, the structural sentence diagram is regarded in two different ways. The comparative analysis of the two interpretations resulted from teaching modern Russian syntax at the Faculty of Russian Philology of Yerevan State University since 1979. The effectiveness of the approaches was tested in practical syntax classes and during philology students’ teaching practice at school. According to the first interpretation, the structural sentence diagram is a minimal sentence construction pattern that satisfies the requirements of grammatical adequacy of a sentence and is presented in the form of formalised records. The author of this concept is N. Yu. Shvedova. The second interpretation is based on two factors, namely grammatical and informative adequacy. The second understanding seems to be the most convincing since it corresponds to the modern stage of syntax development, i. e., the semantic syntax stage. This line of research is represented by a large number of works by different scientists. Although each researcher implements the main idea of this research direction differently, they adopt the same approach. G. A. Zolotova does not deny the convenience of formalised records which have lasting importance for science and the practice of teaching Russian as a foreign language. However, she believes that representing syntactic structures in the form of formulas and diagrams does not reflect the essence of syntactic relations. Rather, it contains morphological characteristics of objects, which, undoubtedly, is not exhaustive. If one disregards the content plane of a sentence and presents structural diagrams as a closed list, it will result in not using all the possibilities offered by modern science. Science can provide such a description of language structure which serves to express the "communicative meaning". The study employed observation, description, sampling, comparative analysis, and classification.