新编简明英语语言学教程 何兆熊 第四章笔记和习题.docVIP

Chapter 4 Syntax What is syntax? ----a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences. The term syntax is from the ancient Greek word syntaxis, which literally means “arrangement” or “setting out together”. Traditionally, it refers to the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence. Syntax is a branch of linguistics that analyzes the structure of sentences. What is a sentence? Syntax is the analysis of sentence structure. A sentence is a sequence of words arranged in a certain order in accordance with grammatical rules. A sequence can be either well-formed or ill-formed. Native speakers of a language know intuitively what strings of words are grammatical and what are ungrammatical. Knowledge of sentence structure Structural ambiguity Structural ambiguity is one or more string(s) of words has/have more than one meaning. For example, the sentence Tom said he would come yesterday can be interpreted in different ways. Word order Different arrangements of the same words have different meanings. For example, with the words Tom, love and Mary, we may say Tom loves Mary or Mary loves Tom. Grammatical relations Native speakers know what element relates to what other element directly or indirectly. For example, in The boats are not big enough and We don’t have enough boats, the word enough is related to different words in the two sentences. Recursion The same rule can be used repeatedly to create infinite sentences. For example, I know that you are happy. He knows that I know that you are happy. She knows that he knows that I know that you are happy. Sentence relatedness Sentences may be structurally variant but semantically related. Syntactic categories A syntactic category is a class of words or phrases that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality. For ex