Syntax and its basic notions. (Lecture 4. Part 1) презентация

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 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.

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.