4.3英语文学学习.pptVIP

Syntax Chapter Four Syntax 1. What is syntax? Syntax is the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language. Simply speaking, it is the study of the formation of sentences. There are different approaches to syntax in the linguistic field. 2. The traditional approach The traditional approach views a sentence as a sequence of words. The study of sentence formation thus involves the study of the parts of speech and grammatical functions of words, and other categories such as number, gender, case, tense, aspect, voice, concord and government. Read the textbook, and you can get a better understanding of the grammatical knowledge of English that you have already known. Particularly, pay attention to how linguists distinguish time from tense (P117). 3.The structural approach This approach was started by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, in the beginning of the 20th century. All the linguistic theories after Saussure are structural in that they all regard linguistic units as interrelated with each other in a structure (or system), not as isolated bits. Only one of Saussure’s main idea and the American structuralist model of sentence analysis are talked about here. 3.1 Syntagmatic vs. Paradigmatic Relations (P120-22) 3.1.1 Defining the two relations In Saussure’s view, language is a system of signs (i.e. words), and the value of each individual sign must be explained from its relations to others, or its position in the system. The two principle types of relations which Saussure identified are syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. Term Definition The syntagmatic relation (组合关系), nowadays also referred to as the horizontal relation or the chain relation, is the relation between one item ant others in a linear sequence, or between elements which are all present. The paradigmatic relation (聚合关系), nowadays also referred