Once Again about the Isolation of Prepositive Attributive Phrases

The article offers an explanation of the rules for punctuation of prepositive attributive phrases and provides a commentary on the corresponding section of the Code of Spelling and Punctuation Rules of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The problem of detachment is proposed to be solved in connection with the category of taxis and the category of definiteness/indefiniteness. Detachment is a means of expressing dependent predicativity, which results from additional associations between the attributive phrase and the predicate. The condition for the appearance of these associations and additional adverbial meanings between the main and dependent predicates is taxis, understood as a technique of interpredicative interaction. The other aspect of the problem of detachment is the semantics of a defined noun or pronoun to which the phrase refers. The rules for detachment of attributive phrases defining a noun, correlate with the ones for pronouns, which makes it possible to show the significance of the referential status of a defined noun for distinguishing between attributive and predicative-attributive relations. As the Russian grammar doesn`t have articles, the category of definiteness/indefiniteness reveals itself in the rules for detachment of prepositive phrases at the absolute beginning of a sentence. The condition for detachment in this position is the concrete referential status of a noun being defined (its familiarity from the previous text, its definiteness and individuality). The prohibition on detachment is due to the values of uncertainty and generality in the meaning of the nominal component. The paper also considers synonymous relations between participial and gerund phrases at the absolute beginning.