Theme 12. Simple sentence: constituent structure

1.The Grammatical Meaning of Syntactic Signals

2. Structural classification of simple sentences.

3. Analysis of Sentence Parts

4. Constituent parts of the sentence.

5. IC –Model of the sentence

Terms: sentence, utterance, predication, modality, predicative line, representation, substitution, semantic roles, immediate constituents, enclosure, model

The Grammatical Meaning of Syntactic Signals

Syntactic signals have a meaning of their own independent of the meaning of the notional words. This can be illustrated by the following sentence with nonsensical words: Woggles ugged diggles

The morphological and the syntactic signals in the given sentence (including the word- order and intonation contour) make us understand that several actors acted upon some objects. This sentence, which is a syntactic signal, makes the listener understand it as a declarative sentence whose grammatical meaning is actor-action-thing acted upon. You can easily change (transform) the sentence into the singular (The woggle ugged a diggle), negative (the Woggle did not ugg a diggle), or interrogative (Did the woggle ugg a diggle?)

Thus, the grammatical meaning of a syntactic construction shows the relations between the words in it.

All the words of a language fall into notional words and functional words.

Notional words are divided into four classes in accordance with the position in which they stand in a sentence.

Notional words as positional classes are generally represented by the following symbols: N, V, A, D(determiner)

The man descended the steep (крутой) stairs slowly

N V A N D

He positions marked N,V,A,D may be filled in by nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or their equivalents, respectively. In other words, if a word could fit into a position without causing a change in the grammatical (structural) meaning of the sentence, the word belongs to a certain class.

Functional words do not fill in the positions of notional words. They are formal signals of the relations between the notional words and are closely connected with the grammatical meaning of the sentence as a whole.

Unlike the notional words which are very numerous the functional words are limited in number. According to Ch. Fries there are 154 functional words in English. Among them we find determiners, modal and auxiliary verbs, connective words (conjunctives, relatives, subordinators), prepositions, introducers (there, it), interrogative words (where, why, how, etc), Interjections, the words “yes” and “no”, attention-getting signals (look, say, listen), request signals (please, let’s), degree words (very, so).

A syntactic construction has a meaning of its own, independent of the meaning of the concrete words that fill in its positions. This is true both of sentences and phrases- the constituent parts of a sentence. This fact makes it possible to represent sentences and phrases as models in the most general way using the symbols of the word-classes. The following sentences can be symbolically represented as

The cheese spreads well N VI D

She signed the letter N VT N

He raised his eyes questioningly N VT N D

One can give many concrete sentences by filling the positions in the above models with words of the indicated classes.