Substantive sentences as a means used by British politicians to express their identity judgments (based on the transcripts of the British Parliament meetings for 2020)

Abstract

The paper examines the semantic-structural characteristics of substantive sentences used by British politicians when verbalizing their identity judgements in parliamentary discourse. Attention is focused on the substantive sentences with the structure “S (Pr) + P (Vfcop + N)” implementing the proposition P(x) with the semantics “attribution of a feature to the subject of judgment”. The aim of the study is to determine what view of the speaker as an identity holder is formed by means of these sentences, depending on their semantic-structural properties. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it identifies and describes types of substantive sentences that differ in their semantic-structural characteristics and reveals their correlation with the verbalization of certain information about the speaker’s identity. As a result of the study, it is found that in English substantive sentences of different types a different format of the speaker’s perception is created: the speaker can act as a representative of a certain category (group) of people, as a single whole with a community of people sharing the same characteristics, as an owner of rather vague properties and characteristics inherent in all members of the group to which the speaker himself belongs.