语言学第四章

• 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?
• Exocentric construction: – the basic sentence, – the prepositional phrase, – the predicate (verb + object) construction – the connective (be + complement) construction.
4.1 Syntactic Relations
• Syntactic relations can be analysed into three kinds:
– relations of position – relations of substitutability – relations of co-occurrence
• Genetic classification
• Areal classification
– SVO, VSO, SOV, OVS, OSV, & VOS.
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.
– To make it more understandable, they are called Vertical Relations or Choice Relations.
4.1.3 Relation of Co-occurrence
• It means that 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.
4.2.1 Grammatical Construction • Grammatical construction (or construct) refers to 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 the construct contains.
• Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable “Centre” or “Head” inside the group.
The girl ate the apple
Syntactic Categories
Word-level
N=noun A=adjective V=verb P=preposition Det=determiner Adv=adverb Conj=conjunction
Phrasal
NP=noun phrase AP=adjective phrase VP=verb phrase PP=preposition phrase S=sentence or clause
Tree diagram
S
NP Det N V VP NP
Det N
The boy ate the apple
Bracketing
• ((The) ( boy)) ( (ate) ((the) (apple))). • [S [NP [Det The] [N girl] ] [VP [V ate] [NP [Det the] [N apple]]]]
– The
strong man tallest boy pretty girl
smiles.
yesterday. last week. the day before.
– He went there
• This is also called Associative Relations by Saussure, and Paradigmatic Relations by Hjemslev.
• 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.
• Relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations, partly to paradigmatic relations.
4.2 Grammatical Construction and Its Constituents
– the girl (NP)
– ate the apple (VP)
– the girl ate the apple (S)
• Immediate Constituent Analysis
( IC Analysis)
The analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents– word groups (or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached.
4.2.4 Coordination and Subordination
• Endocentric constructions fall into two main types, depending on the relation between constituents.
• He kicked the ball. (Neither constituent stands for the verb-object sequence.) • John seemed angry. (After division, the connective construction no longer exists.)
• Syntax is 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.
4.2.3 Endocentric and Exocentric Constructions
• Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable centre or head. – E.g. noun phrases, verb phrases & adjective phrases
来自百度文库hree basic ways to • Word order
Genetic relatedness, i.e. some languages share a classify languages: common ancestor language, e.g. English and German
– 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.
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
• The boy smiled. (Neither constituent can substitute for the sentence structure as a whole.)
• He hid behind the door. (Neither constituent can function as an adverbial.)
– an apple (determiner +noun→ NP)
– ate an apple (verb + NP → VP)
– Mary ate an apple (noun + VP → S)
4.2.2 Immediate Constituents
• Constituent is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a construction:
Chapter 4 From Word to Text
Outline
4.1 Syntactic Relations 4.2 Grammatical Construction and Its Constituents 4.3 Syntactic Function 4.4 Category 4.5 Phrase, Clause and Sentence 4.6 Recursiveness 4.7 Beyond the Sentence