Works of Anatoliy M. Mukhin: Two Laws of Language Functioning

Theoretical postulates of linguistic analysis contained in nine Mukhin’s monographs are researched. Based on the methods of linguistic modeling and experiment, these works described more than 400 elementary syntactic units - syntaxemes: positional, optional, combinatorial. Syntaxeme is a unique unit - invariant. Syntax and semantic features make up the content of the syntaxeme. The content features of syntaxemes are diagnosed on the basis of their distributional features. Studies of functional syntax have revealed a number of regularities: syntaxemes are system units endowed with syntactic and semantic features; differential syntactic features are asemantic and reflect the functions of the components in the structure of the sentence, that is, they are elementary units. The repetition of features, the oppositional series of syntaxemes, the autonomy and originality of synsematic and syntactic features proper are the regularities concerning the interaction of syntaxemes and components of a sentence. The purpose of the article is to formulate the established regularities of functional syntax associated with the functioning of newly discovered syntactic units. The novelty of the work lies in the substantiation of the two laws of language discovered by A.M. Mukhin. The first law concerns the interaction of sentence components and syntaxemes and states that linguistic reality does not allow mixing of the syntactic feature of homogeneity and syntactic-semantic features, which are carried by the components of the sentence and syntaxemes. The second law is about the repetition of features of syntaxemes. These features allowed A.M. Mukhin to establish 27 oppositional rows of syntaxemes.