Синтаксис английского языка от слова к тексту = A Students’ Guide to English Syntax from Word to Discourse. Учебное пособие

FOREWORD

A Students’ Guide to English Syntax: from Word to Discourse is a grammar book for students of English as a second language. The book serves a two-fold purpose: to provide a systematic study of the syntactic structure of Modern English and to offer a wide variety of exercise types, all of which require students to think about what they are reading, hearing, saying, or writing.

A Students’ Guide to English Syntax: from Word to Discourse is divided into five chapters. Each chapter focuses on a certain area of syntax and all the exercises within the chapter relate to this area. You may choose to emphasize some chapters and leave out others, or to cover chapters in any order that meets the particular needs of students. However, as grammar and vocabulary are recycled and reinforced throughout the book, it would be more beneficial to work on the chapters sequentially.

The order in which we are going to deal with the problems of English syntax is roughly the following.

In the introductory part of the book we shall attempt to provide a general outline of syntax as a domain of language and give an extensive review of basic and more complex syntactical issues.

The first chapter of the book deals with a simple sentence as a monopredicative construction. The problem of classification of simple sentences is a highly complicated one, and we will consider different principles of classification and the notions on which it can be based.

This part consists of several very unequal items: the description of structural and functional types of a simple sentence, ways of expressing negation, the theory of speech acts, and, finally, actual division of the utterance.

Our next point will be a general survey of the structure of a simple sentence (the so-called “parts of a sentence”) and a detailed investigation of each of them in particular.

There is much more to be said about the composite sentence than about the simple one. In the third chapter of the book a review of various types of composite sentences is provided, two main types of composite sentences, namely a compound sentence and a complex sentence, are distinguished and their structural characteristics are thoroughly described.

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Ю. М. СЕРГЕЕВА, И. О. СЫРЕСИНА. СИНТАКСИС АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА: ОТ СЛОВА К ТЕКСТУ

YULIA SERGEEVA, IRINA SYRESINA. A STUDENTS’ GUIDE TO ENGLISH SYNTAX: FROM WORD TO DISCOURSE

Though punctuation is not in itself part of the grammatical structure of a language, it shouldn’t be passed over in a treatise on grammar, as it can, and often does, acquire grammatical significance. In different languages the relations between punctuation, intonation and syntax are different. Now from this viewpoint it may be beneficial for students to master the basic rules of using punctuation marks in a simple sentence, as well as in a composite sentence.

In the fifth chapter of the book we will consider the text as the highest existing syntactical unit of which a sentence is but a component part.

In studying the text we are faced with a number of problems belonging to the science of language as a whole rather than to English philology. We cannot here go full length into all these problems. Consequently, we will content ourselves with stating some fundamental notions of text linguistics, those of text and discourse, syntactic-semantic cohesion and deixis as the main categories of the text, and a dicteme as a topical unit.

Though problems of style as such are outside the scope of this book, some information concerning the stylistic value of syntactic structures may prove appropriate to a thorough study of English syntax. From this viewpoint some grammatical phenomena are neutral, while others have a distinct stylistic colouring and will produce a certain stylistic effect. That is why a study of syntactical expressive means constitutes an important part of this chapter.

The final section of the book does not introduce any new theory, but contains a guide to linguistic and stylistic analysis of a fiction text. This part may be used as a review at the end of a course, as a kind of diagnostic tool.

Each chapter of the book follows the basic pattern: reference section+ exercises + integration.

Reference sections in A Students’ Guide to English Syntax: from Word to Discourse thoroughly explain the form and meaning of each syntactic unit you may come across while learning the language. The presentation of theoretical issues is supplied with examples to give them additional clarity.

These sections can be used in different ways according to different teaching and learning styles. Some teachers may want to use reference sections in class in their introduction of new grammar points or review of more familiar ones. Others may want students

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Foreword

to go over the rules as homework before or after the teacher’s explanation.

The largest part of each chapter is made up of exercises where students practice the grammar of the chapter. Grammar points are broken down into segments that correspond to their presentation in the reference section. Some exercises begin with a short introduction; you can use this for a starting point of the discussion of the cultural context presented in the exercise. It is often useful to have students read through the entire exercise before doing it.

Exercises follow a variety of formats according to the characteristics of the material being practiced, the content area focused on, and students’ needs to use this knowledge. Some exercises focus primarily on understanding the essence of syntactic units and defining their typological properties. Others demand from students to produce grammatical structures in writing. Other exercises view the students’ oral presentation as their primary goal. Exercises often contain a section where students are asked to relate the content of the exercise to their own ideas or experiences.

In the last part of each chapter there are exercises that incorporate all the grammar points from the chapter. What a student is meant to acquire as a result of their studies is an insight into the syntactic structure of the language as well as an ability to use certain grammar structures.

The authors hope that A Students’ Guide to English Syntax: from Word to Discourse will help to improve the general linguistic awareness of the students as information about syntactic structure of English is a necessary prerequisite for mastering the language.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the Chair of English Grammar at the Moscow State University of Education as we have received a great deal of support from our colleagues in the preparation of this book.

We especially thank Galina Gumovskaya, professor of the High School of Economics (Moscow), and Lubov Nefedova, professor of the Moscow State University of Education, Head of Department of the German language, for their suggestions and encouragement, for valuable feedback in the preparation of the manuscript.

Finally, we wish to thank our students who have helped us evolve an approach to the teaching of Grammar that we believe is an effective and challenging one.

Yulia Sergeeva, Irina Syresina

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A GENERAL OUTLINE OF SYNTAX

The grammatical structure of language comprises two major parts, which are obviously interdependent – morphology and syntax.

Morphology deals with morphological units – morphemes and words, their internal structure and their relationship to other words and word forms within the paradigm. It studies parts of speech and their morphological categories.

Syntax, on the other hand, studies the way in which words are combined. It is concerned with their external functions and their relationship to other words within word-groups, sentences and texts. It also deals with peculiarities of syntactic units in various contexts.

Syntactic units may be analysed from different points of view, and accordingly, different syntactic theories exist.

Transformational-Generative Grammar is a synthetic method of constructing sentences. Its main point is that the endless variety of sentences in a language can be reduced to a finite number of kernel sentences which serve the basis for generating other sentences by means of syntactic transformations. Different scholars recognize the existence of different number of kernels (from 3 to 39). The following 6 kernel sentences are commonly associated with the English language:

(1)NV – John sings.

(2)NVAdj.– John is happy.

(3)NVN – John is a man.

(4)NVN – John hit the man.

(5)NVNN – John gave the man a book.

(6)NVPrep.N – The book is on the table.

Transformational method proves useful for analysing sentences from the point of their deep structure.

Communicative Syntax is primarily concerned with the analysis of utterances from the point of their communicative value and informative structure. It deals with the actual division of the utterance indicating the thematic and the rhematic components of it. The theme is something that is known already while the rheme represents some new information. Depending on the contextual informative value any sentence element can act as the theme or the rheme:

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Ю. М. СЕРГЕЕВА, И. О. СЫРЕСИНА. СИНТАКСИС АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА: ОТ СЛОВА К ТЕКСТУ

YULIA SERGEEVA, IRINA SYRESINA. A STUDENTS’ GUIDE TO ENGLISH SYNTAX: FROM WORD TO DISCOURSE

What is on the table? – A book is on the table. Where is the book? – The book is on the table.

Speech Act Theory, first introduced by John Austin, demonstrates pragmatic approach to the study of syntactic units used in particular contexts to achieve particular goals. The notion of a speech act presupposes that an utterance is created with different intentions or purposes and therefore can influence the interlocutors and the situation in different ways. Accordingly, we distinguish different speech acts.

It’s hot here.

I just state the fact;

I want you to do something about it (turn on the air con); I’m looking for an excuse for not doing something;

I want you to feel guilty of it, etc.

Text linguistics studies the text as a syntactic unit, its main features and peculiarities, different ways of its analysis.

Discourse analysis focuses on the study of language use with reference to the social and psychological factors that influence communication.

BASIC SYNTACTIC NOTIONS

The syntactic language level can be described with the help of special linguistic terms and notions: syntactic unit, syntactic form, syntactic meaning, syntactic function, syntactic position, and syntactic relations.

Syntactic unit is always a combination of at least two constituents. The basic syntactic units are a phrase (word-group), a clause, a sentence, and a text.

They are hierarchical units – the units of a lower level serve the building material for the units of a higher level, i.e. clauses are made of word-groups, composite sentences – of clauses, texts – of sentences.

They are of communicative (sentences and texts) and noncommunicative nature (word-groups and clauses).

They are two-faucet units: they have the plane of content (syntactic meaning) and the plane of expression (syntactic form).

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