The Role of the Multiphase Structure of an Action in Classifying Situations by the Degree of Control (Based on English Utterances)

The article analyses utterances from modern English to establish the peculiarities of the process how the presence or absence of control is manifested in a situation as a multiphase process consisting of seven stages such as a wish, an intention, a decision, planning, preparation, an attempt, a result (success or failure). The implicative character of language representations allows us to assume that a situation can be rendered into utterance explicitly as a complete process or metonymically, through one of the genesis of action stages (using phase and intention markers, lexems with connotative meaning, etc.), and both cases can prove sufficiency to obtain a full and complete image of the situation. Thus, analyzing if a situation represented by an utterance is controlled or non-controlled, we shall focus on the whole process instead of examining one of its parts. The theoretical part of the article explains the choice of the term «control» from semantically similar terms and demonstrates some basic approaches to understanding the concept of control in linguistics. Moreover, the article analyses how the notion of control is applied to predicates and situations; discusses the notions of the genesis of an action and implication that makes it possible to provide a more specific view on what should be considered as a situation. The practical part of the article shares the results obtaining by the analysis of English utterances taken from literature, media or the Oxford Dictionary example bank confirming the sufficiency of a metonymic representation of a situation; it offers a classification of situations based on the completeness of their representation in the language and on the degree of control (depending on what and how many stages are marked as controlled or non-controlled).