简明教程Chapter .pptVIP

Chapter FourSyntax 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. 1. Syntactic relations Syntactic relations can be analysed into three kinds: relations of position relations of substitutability relations of co-occurrence 1.1 Relations of Position 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 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, one tends to produce an utterance either ungrammatical or nonsensical at all. For example, 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. 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. 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. strong man The tallest boy smiles. pretty girl yesterday. He went there last week. the day before. This is also called Associative Relations by Saussure, and Paradigmatic Relations by Hjemslev. To make it more understandable, they are called Vertical Relations or Choice Relations. 1.3 Relation of Co-occurrence It means that words of differ