теор.грамматика / Лекция 4

Лекція 4 SYNTAX

LECTURE 4 SYNTAX

LECTURE 4 SYNTAX

The history of syntactic studies 1) Ancient times 2) middle ages 3) Modern times Minor and major syntax 1) Syntax of phrase 2) The sentence a) the simple sentence b) ic of the sentence c) tree diagram

The term ‘syntax’ was introduced by Stoics in iii c. BC (Ancient Greece)

Syntax (Greek. Sýntaxis – побудова, порядок) – 1) means and rules of creating speech units of a given language; 2) a part of grammar studying speech producing processes: combinability and word order within a sentence, general properties of the sentence as a language unit and of the utterance as a speech unit

Three parts of Syntax

1. Syntax of parts of speech (word combinations, syntagmatics) studies combinability of words (syntactic valency)

2. Syntax of the sentence (inner structure, communicative types of sentences, predication and modality, semantics and synonymic transformations)

3. Syntax of the text (rules of adapting the sentence into the context)

Ancient times The study of syntax was carried out from the point of view of speech–thought creating processes. No specific terminology was used as yet. The notions used reflected logical, syntactic and morphological approaches to syntactic studies

Ancient Greek philosophers (Protagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics) studied indiscrete speech units; classified utterances due to their communicative value; divided the sentence into main parts; defined relations between the parts of the complex and compound sentence

Protagoras (Vc BC)  distinguished question, answer, request, command

Aristotle (384-322 BC): confirmative, negative, narrative,  imperative utterances

Stoics (IIIc BC): negative, affirmative  sentences, general/special question, orders, swears,                                 requests, vocative  utterances

PLATO (424/423 BC – 348/347 BC)  a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of                             Socrates. Plato and followers divided  a sentence into two parts: name (onoma) and verb (rhema) i.e. Subject and Predicate

Stoics, Ancient Greece III c. BC initiated the study of the complex and compound sentence and relations within it as causal, result, conditional, connective, disjunctive

Apollonius Dyscolus (II c. AD) Nicknamed ὁ δύσκολος, meaning "the Surly or Crabbed or Hard to please” Apollonius is the first Greek grammarian of whom we possess a work in its entirety. Syntax is viewed from morphological grounds (word as the basis) > syntax of parts of speech.

Middle ages (XIII-XVI c) Scholasticism, Rationalism, Port Royal Grammar

Syntax  was viewed as study of ways of expressing thought. Syntactic categories as opposed to morphological ones were thought to be of universal character

Followers of this approach: (XIX c) M.V. Lomonosov, L.G. Yakob, I.I. Davydov, K.S.Aksakov, F.I.Buslaev

Approaches to Syntactic studies in XIX-XX c.

Psychological (Heymann Steinthal, Olexandr Potebnya, German Paul, Wilhelm Wundt)

Functional: Ways Of Detecting Thought In A Word: Meaning / Function > Form (A.A. Shakhmatov,          O. Jespersen, F.F.Fortunatov, Vilém Mathesius) studying and systematizing various language units (syntactic structures) as they function in the speech-thinking activity of man. The problem of combinability and valency, the problem of syntactical analysis.

Structural: Lucien Tesniere; Zelig Harris

Descriptive (Distributional) Syntax (Leonard Bloomfield, Pike Kenneth Lee, Ch. Fries, Eugene Nida) The chief contribution of the American Descriptive School to modern linguistics is the elaboration of the techniques of linguistic analysis. The main methods are the Distributional method and the method of Immediate Constituents.

Semantic (Dwight Bolinger) Studies the semantics of the word-combination constituents, of the parts of the sentence and of the sentence as a whole the role meanings of the sentence components the phenomena of the reference, of the presupposition and sequence.

major :: minor syntax major syntax – sentence, text; minor syntax – phrase

-          the phrase alongside with the sentence is the main syntactic unit.

-          it consists of minimum 2 members that are of

1)      subordinate relations only (Vinogradov V.V. and other Russian linguists), no predicative or prepositional phrases (word and phrase are very close)

2)      both coordinate and subordinate relations (L. Bloomfield and majority of scholars)