FORM

The author discusses the problem of the form of linguistic signs in different linguistic-philosophical paradigms: rationalistic (formalistic), postrationalistic, structural and poststructural. According to the author the dynamics of the linguistic-philosophical paradigms has depended on two factors: the divisibility or indivisibility of the form and the content, and also the domination of the form or the content in the structure of linguistic signs as objects of linguistic description. The author distinguishes three kinds of linguistic forms: explicative (monomorphous), operative, and implicative, and discusses them in detail with reference to the stylistic function of the sentence in Polish and Russian. Special attention is given to zero forms, which are treated as a kind of synsemantic (index) signs, equivalent to anaphoric and cataphoric pronouns. The author considers also the problem of nonverbal forms, i.e. those which result from the cooperation of the utterance and the text with the relevant situational context. He introduces the notion of the principle of optimality, which defines the cooperation of the different factors of linguistic communication.