Syntax and its basic notions Syntactic theories Lecture

Syntax and its basic notions. Syntactic theories. Lecture 8

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.

From Antiquity to nowadays 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 20 th 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”: 1) there’s a single and natural way to express thought; 2) strict connection b/w the categories of thought and language; 3) 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 20 th 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 20 th 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 1 a 2 -d D 3 1 b 4 + distribution; – linear, no distinction b/w certain different structures. E. G. : English cities and villages vs. old men and children.

The 20 th 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

The 20 th 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) NV NVр. N NVN N is p N N is D N is A (John came) (John looked at Mary) (John saw Mary) (John is a teacher) (John is in bed) (John is out) (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; twofold (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.

The syntactic relations 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): ü primary (the subject and the predicate): men worked; ü secondary (non-finite forms of the verb and nominal elements): his reading, for me to know, the boy running, I saw him run.