chapter_4_句法学_胡壮麟.pptVIP

Subordinate clauses Clauses can be used as subordinate constituents. There are three basic types of subordinate clauses: complement clauses John believes [that the airplane was invented by an Irishman]. adjunct (or adverbial) clauses Elizabeth opened her presents [before John finished his dinner]. relative clauses The woman [that I love] is moving to the south. Good morning, everyone! Review questions 1. What are the three syntactic relations? 2. What is the difference between endocentric and exocentric constructions? Give one or two examples. 3. What is the difference between subordination and coordination? Please use one or two examples to explain it. 4.3 Syntactic Function Definition: The syntactic function shows the relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of the linguistic pattern in which it is used. Names of functions are expressed in terms of subjects, objects, predicators, modifiers, complements, etc. Preview questions 1. What is subject? What is object? Can you give simple definitions to them? 2. What is predicate? What is predicator? Are they the same? 4.3.1 Subject Three traditional definitions for subject: In some languages, subject refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case. Latin: subject is always in nominative case pater filium amat (the father loves the son) patrum filius amat (the son loves the father) 1 English: subject-the agent, or the doer of the action; object-the person or thing acted upon by the agent. Mary slapped John. A dog bit Bill. but is clearly wrong in passive voice: John was bitten by a dog. grammatical subject logical subject 2 Subject subject: “what the sentence is about” (i.e., topic). this seems to work for many sentences, such as Bill is a very crafty fellow. but fails in others, such as (Jack is pretty reliable, but) Bill I don’t trust. As for Bill, I wouldn’t take his promises very seriously. The topic is not always the grammatical subject. 3 Subject Word order Subject o