Syntax and its basic notions. Syntactic theories. Lecture 7 Lecture outline - The concerns of syntax.
- Syntax: a historical perspective.
- The syntactic theories: traditional and modern. Sentence models.
- The syntactic notions.
Syntax - deals with the way words are combined;
- the external functions of words and their relationship to other words within the linearly ordered units – word-groups, sentences, texts;
- the peculiarities of syntactic units, their behavior in different contexts.
Syntax - the sentence structure (the central concern of syntax);
- the word groups as parts of the sentences structure;
- the syntactically connected groups of sentences.
Syntax - the means of grammatical connection of words, the study of the word-groups;
- the formation of the sentence.
Syntax - from Greek ‘syn’ – together, ‘taxis’ – ordering);
- grammatical structure of sentences and word-groups and the regularities of their functioning in speech;
- a subfield of linguistics, which studies the regularities describing word-groups and sentences, as well as the strucutre, features, and types of word-groups and sentences.
Syntax - The syntax of word-groups: the rules governing the combinability of words with other words.
- The syntax of sentences: types, features of the sentence, relations of words and word combinations in the sentence.
Syntax: a historical perspective - the sentence – the text (grammar – text linguistics);
- the place of syntactic studies in linguistics.
- sentence classification according to the communicative goal (Aristotle);
- two important components in a sentence – the name and the verb (Plato);
- the term was coined, the composite sentence (the Stoics).
From Antiquity to nowadays - Up to the 20th c.: logical vs. formal and grammatical views of syntax.
- Logical: language is the means of expressing thoughts, the “parts of thought” are reflected in and similar to the “parts of the sentences”.
- Formal and grammatical: types and features of word-groups and sentences.
The Grammar of Port Royal - "General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaking, explained in a clear and natural manner”;
- 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot.
The Grammar of Port Royal “the general grammar”: - there’s a single and natural way to express thought;
- strict connection b/w the categories of thought and language;
- all languages express the same categories.
! Chomsky General grammar denied Comparative-historical view: - language diversity was acknowledged;
- no ‘natural way’ to express thoughts;
- logic is no longer the basis.
Psychologistic view: - syntax has to be based on psychology;
- general syntax is impossible.
The 20th c. views of syntax Sentence models (by Barkhudarov) “The parts of the sentence” model (ancient grammars): the primary – the subject and the predicate; the secondary – the object, the attribute, the adverbial modifier. The 20th c. views of syntax Sentence models (by Barkhudarov) The distributive model (Charles Fries): - the sentence is the sequence of words of specific word classes, which are used in particular grammatical forms.
The old man saw a black dog there. D 3 1a 2-d D 3 1b 4 + distribution; – linear, no distinction b/w certain different structures. E.G.: English cities and villages vs. old men and children. The 20th c. views of syntax Sentence models (by Barkhudarov) IC model - the sentence is hierarchically layered;
- the sequence of classes of words + the syntactic relations b/w them;
- allows to differentiate b/w the structures which are distributionally the same.
IC analysis IC analysis The 20th c. views of syntax Sentence models (by Barkhudarov) Transformational model (Chomsky): - The endless variety of sentences in a language can be reduced to a finite number of kernels by means of transformations.
- The kernel sentences can be extended (depends on the combinability).
- The rules of analysis vs. the rules of generating.
The kernel sentences (English) N V (John came) N V р N (John looked at Mary) N V N (John saw Mary) N is N (John is a teacher) N is p N (John is in bed) N is D (John is out) N is A (John is angry) Different “syntaxes” - Traditional (structural and static): the structure of the word-groups and the sentence, their types, features, structural models.
- Semantic or functional and semantic: abstract meanings of structural elements of the sentence (Charles Bally, modus vs. dictum).
Different “syntaxes” - Generative: universal deep and surface structures, rules of transformations, semantics vs. structure.
- Communicative: the dynamic view of the sentence – the utterance; their actual division (the theme (old) and the rheme (new)), intonation and word order.
Different “syntaxes” - Constructional: constructional significance/insignificance of a part of the sentence for the whole syntactic unit; obligatory and optional environments of syntactic elements (I helped her yesterday).
Different “syntaxes” - Stylistic: syntactic units and functional styles, inversion, etc.
- Text syntax: the rules of connecting sentences in the context, the syntactic units and their roles in the expressiveness of the text.
Different “syntaxes” - Cognitive: syntactic constructions (utterances) and human knowledge; the creative character of language.
- Pragmatics: the way we use the syntactic units; Speech acts theory.
It’s cold here (stating a fact, expressing the will, threatening, etc.) The syntactic notions - Syntactic unit: a combination that has at least two constituents; hierarchical; two-fold (syntactic meaning and form), communicative and non-communicative nature.
- A word-group, a clause, a sentence, and a text.
The syntactic notions - Syntactic meaning: the way in which separate word meanings are combined to produce meaningful word-groups and sentences (Green ideas sleep furiously).
- Syntactic form: distributional formula.
- Syntactic function: the function of a unit on the basis of which it is included into a larger unit.
The syntactic notions - Syntactic position: the position of an element in a sentence; very important for analytic languages.
- Syntactic relations: the syntagmatic relations between the syntactic units.
Coordination (independence): - word group, sentence, text;
- symmetric and asymmetric (pens and pencils, ladies and gentlemen);
- copulative (you and me), disjunctive (you or me), adversative (strict but just), causative-consecutive (He didn’t come, because…).
The syntactic relations Subordination (dependence, difference linguistic rank): - word-group and sentence;
- adverbial (to run slowly), objective (to help a friend); attributive (a new house);
- the head and the adjunct.
Syntactic relations Predication (interdependence): - primary (the subject and the predicate): men worked;
- secondary (non-finite forms of the verb and nominal elements): his reading, for me to know, the boy running, I saw him run.
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