Laktionova A. Normativity in constituting linguistic units: a philosophical analysis.

The dissertation is devoted to the study of ontological and epistemological aspects of re-alization of linguistic entities in the form of linguistic units as the facts of speech, where a special subject of interest is the epistemological status of the latter, as well as the normativity (implicit norms) inherent in them, which provides for their constituting. Within the frame of conception presented in the research, a 'norm' is a fundamental hypothesis about the possi-bility of a linguistic unit, which makes possible a linguistic unit together with the other norms of it and is realized in a definite pragmatic context, which regulates its appropriateness and, in its turn, provides for its interpretation. The role of the concepts of fact, norm and valuation in the formulation of the concept of linguistic unit are considered in the study, the relation-ships between normativity and valuation are reconsidered, the role of social acts of recogni-tion in the making of normativity of linguistic usage is analyzed, the necessity of and a vari-ant of the answer to the fundamental question about the epistemological status of linguistic units as related to the implicit epistemic normativity are set forth and reasoned, the formal definition of the norm of linguistic unit in the form of the rule of 'evidence' is given. Also, the problems of normative regulation of practical usage of linguistic units are covered in the dissertation. The practical import of the results obtained extends to the areas of contempo-rary studies in artificial intelligence (computer science), of semantic studies (linguistics), of constructing the natural and the artificial languages logical systems, of development of communicative theory of language, as well as of resolving the ontologico-gnoseological dif-ficulties in the field of philosophical logic.