INFINITIVE STRUCTURES IN THE LANGUAGES OF CONTRAST

The article is devoted to a functional typology of infinitive structures in a number of European languages (English, German, Russian, Polish, Spanish and French), which is highly significant for contrastive linguistics and the theory of universals; specifically, it goes a long way to building a typology of sentence structures and establishing syntactic universals. The method of analysis is based on contrasting infinitive structures as part of inductively selected equivalent sentences of concrete languages with a language etalon. Representation of linguistic structures in each section of the language etalon corresponds to one of the four types: 1) universal (infinitive in all representations), 2) frequent (infinitive in a majority of representations), 3) marginal (infinitive in a minority of representations), 4) unique (infinitive in one representation only). The criterion of language structures representing the etalon is based on prototype as the most characteristic way of expressing meaning in a concrete language. The hypothesis of this study consists of two indissolubly united parts: 1) the structural type of language affects its capacity for employing infinitive, 2) employing infinitive results from the tendency to compress text. In general, the research shows considerable cross-linguistic similarity in the function of the infinitive as subject, predicate, object, attribute. Affinity with the etalon is determined by a number of syntactic functions of the infinitive in a clause; according to the decrement of this proximity the contrasted languages can be arranged from left to right in the following order: English → French → Spanish → German → Russian → Polish.