语言学第四章树形图句法

Chapter 4 From word to Text (Syntax)

Syntax (grammar)

Syntax refers to the study of the rules governing the way different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures.

4.1 Syntactic relations

Syntactic relations can be analyzed into three kinds:

4.1.1 positional relation

4.1.2 relations of substitutability

4.1.3 relations of co-occurrence

4.1.1 Positional Relation

For language to fulfill its communicative function, it must have a way to mark the grammatical roles of the various phrases that can occur in a clause.

The boy kicked the ball

NP1 NP2

Subject Object

Positional relation, or WORD ORDER, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language.

If the words in a sentence fail to occur in a fixed order required by the convention of a language, one tends to produce an utterance either ungrammatical or nonsensical at all. For example,

The boy kicked the ball

*Boy the ball kicked the

*The ball kicked the boy

The teacher saw the students

The students saw the teacher

Positional relations are a manifestation of one aspect of Syntagmatic Relations observed by F. de Saussure.

They are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations.

Word order is among the three basic ways (word order, genetic and areal classifications) to classify languages in the world.

There are 6 possible types of language:

SVO, VSO, SOV, OVS, OSV, and VOS.

English belongs to SVO type, though this does not mean that SVO is the only possible word order.

4.1.2 Relation of Substitutability

The Relation of Substitutability refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in sentences with the same structure.

The?______ smiles.?

man

boy

girl

It also refers to groups of more than one word which may be jointly substitutable grammatically for a single word of a particular set.

s