M. Iriskulov, A. Kuldashev a course in Theoretical English Grammar Tashkent 2008

SYNTAX AND ITS MAIN UNITS. 
TRADITIONAL AND COGNITIVE APPROACHES IN SYNTAX 
 
I. Syntax as part of grammar. The main units of syntax. 
II. Traditional and cognitive understanding of syntax. 
III. The basic principles and arguments of the cognitive linguistics. 
IV. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic patterning.
I. Syntax as part of grammar. The main units of syntax. 
Syntax as part of grammar analyses the rules of combining words into phrases, 
sentences and supra-sentential constructions or texts. 
The rules of combinability of linguistic units are connected with the most general 
and abstract parts of content of the elements of language. These parts of content 
together with the formal means of their expression are treated as “grammatical 
categories”. In syntax, they are, for instance, the categories of communicative 
purpose or emphasis, which are actualized by means of word-order. Thus, word-
order (direct or indirect), viewed as a grammatical form, expresses the difference 
between the central idea of the sentence and the marginal idea, between emotive 
and unemotive modes of speech, e.g.: 
In the center of the room stood the old man. 
The word arrangement in this sentence expresses a narrative description with the 
central informative element placed in the strongest position, i.e. at the end.
Thus, grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression 
(i.e. a unity of form and meaning). Accordingly, the purpose of Modern Grammar, 
and Syntax in particular, is to disclose and formulate the rules of the 
correspondence between the plane of content and the plane of expression in the 
process of utterance-formation. 
The main units of syntax are phrases and sentences.

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The phrase is a combination of two or more notional words which is a 
grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of some word. The main difference 
between the phrase and the sentence is in their linguistic function. The phrase is a 
nominative unit, the sentence is a predicative one.
Nomination is naming things and their relations. A nominative unit simply 
names something known to everybody or a majority of native language speakers, 
recalling it from their memory, e.g.: a book, a departure. A phrase represents an 
object of nomination as a complicated phenomenon, be it a thing, an action, a 
quality or a whole situation, e.g.: an interesting book, to start with a jerk, 
absolutely fantastic, his unexpected departure.
The sentence is the immediate unit of speech built up of words according to a 
definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a communicative purpose. The 
sentence, naming a certain situation, expresses predication, i.e. shows the relation 
of the denoted event to reality through the grammatical categories of tense, person 
and mood. The category of tense is used to convey something new and define its 
place in reality as preceding, or following the act of communication. The category 
of person shows, 
whether the situation involves the communicators or not. Through the category of 
mood the event is shown as real or unreal, desirable or obligatory. 
Thus, the sentence presents a unity in its nominative and predicative aspects, 
denoting a certain event in its reference to reality. The distinguishing features of 
the sentence are predication, modality and communicative meaningfulness. 
It is stated that the center of predication in a sentence of verbal type is a finite 
verb, which expresses essential predicative meanings by its categorial forms 
(categories of tense and mood). Some linguists though (V.V Vinogradov, 
M.Y.Bloch ) insist that predication is effected not only by the forms of the finite 
verb, but also by all the other forms and elements of the sentence, which help
establish the connection between the named objects and reality. They are such 
means as intonation, word order, different functional words.
Due to their nominative meaning, both the sentence and the phrase enter the 
system of language by their syntactic patterns. The traditional linguistics considers
four main types of syntactic patterns: predicative (subject қ predicate), objective 
(verb қobject), attributive (attribute қ noun), adverbial (verb/adverb/adjective қ 
adverbial modifier).