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Chapter 4 From World to Text
Syntax:
the study of the
rules governing the ways different constituents
are combined
to
form
sentences
in
a
language,
or
the
study
of
the
interrelationships
between
elements in sentence structures.
Syntactic relations:
1.
Positional
Relation
（
Horizontal
relations/ Chain
relations
）
:
refers to the
sequential arrangement of
words in a language. SVO, SOV
, VSO,
VOS, OSV
,
OVS.
2.
Relation of
Substitutability
(1)
Refers
to
the
classes
or
sets
of
words
substitutable
for
each
other
grammatically in sentences with the
same structure.
(2)
Refers
to
groups
of
more
than
one
word
which
may
be
jointly
substitutable grammatically for a
single word of a particular set.
3.
Relation of
Co-occurrence:
words of different sets
of clauses may permit, or
require, the
occurrence of a word of another set or class to
form a sentence or a
particular part of
a sentence.
Grammatical
Construction/
Construct:
any
syntactic
construct
which
is
assigned
one
or
more
conventional
functions
in
a
language,
together
with
whatever
is
linguistically
conventionalized
about
its
contribution
to
the
meaning
or
use
of
the
construct contains.
1.
External
syntax of a construction: the properties of the
construction as a whole,
that is to
say, anything speakers know about the construction
that is relevant to
the larger
syntactic contexts in which it is welcome.
2.
Internal
syntax of a construction: a description of the
construction
’
s
“
make-
up
”
,
with the
terms such as
“
subject
,
predicate, object, determiner, noun”
.
IC
analysis/
Immediate
Constituent
Analysis:
to
dismantle
a
grammatical
construction.
1.
Tree diagram
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2.
Bracketing
Endocentric construction:
one whose distribution is functionally
equivalent to that
of one or more of
its constituents. (noun phrase, verb phrase,
adjective phrase)
Two features of endocentric
construction:
1.
a word or a group of words serves as a
definable centre or head.
2.
the head shares the same grammatical
function with the whole construction.
Coordination:
a common
syntactic pattern
formed by
grouping together two or
more categories of the same type with
the help of a conjunction such as and,
but,
or.
These
two
or
more
words
or
phrases
or
clauses
have
the
equivalent
syntactic
status,
each
of
the
separate
constituents
can
stand
for
the
original
construction functionally.
Subordination:
the process
or result of linking linguistic units so that they
have
the different syntactic status,
one being dependent upon the other, and usually a
constituent of the other. The
subordinate constituents are words which modify
the Head. (Modifier)
Three
types
of
subordinate
clauses:
complement
clauses,
adjunct
clauses,
relative clauses.
Exocentric
construction:
a group of syntactically
related words where
none of
the
words
is
functionally
equivalent
to
the
group
as
a
whole.
(Basic
sentence,
prepositional phrase, predicates
construction, and connective construction.)
Syntactic
Function:
shows the relationship
between a linguistic form and other parts
of the linguistic pattern in which it
is used.
Subject:
1.
In some
languages, one of the nouns in the nominative
case.
2.
In
English, the subject is often said to be the doer
of the action, while the object
is the
person or thing acted upon by the doer.
3.
What the
sentence is about (topic).
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