句法学演示稿件.pptVIP

英语语言学导论课程课件 课件名称：句法 制 作 人：外国语学院 王敏霞 Chapter Four Syntax Purpose of teaching: Make students know the definition of syntax, and the various approaches to syntactic study Focal points of teaching: the various approaches to syntactic study Definitions of syntax 1. The origin of the word “syntax”: from Greek, made up of two morphemes: {syn} and {tax}. The former means “together”, and the latter “to arrange”, hence the meaning “a setting out together” or “arrange” 2. Definition of syntax: the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences. The mainly fields studying Syntax are: the traditional grammar, structural syntax, generative syntax(生成句法学), functional syntax(功能句法学). The traditional approach Traditionally, a sentence is seen as a sequence of words. The study of sentence formation involves a great deal of the study of the word, such as the classification of words in terms of parts of speech, the identification of functions of words in terms of subject, predicate, etc. These parts of speech and functions are called categories（范畴）. The traditional approach 1. Number, gender and case Number is mostly a category of the noun and pronoun, e.g. a book, some books; I, we, he, they. The English verb also inflects for number, e.g. He speaks English. In languages like French, adjectives and articles have numbers too. Two terms of number: singular and plural. Some languages like classical Greek and Arabic have a third number: dual(双数), which means “both”. And Fijian(斐济语)has a fourth: trial(三数). Chinese is said to have none. 们limited usage，and only human nouns. e.g. 学生们，工人们 The traditional approach Gender(性)is also mostly a category of the noun and pronoun. In English the gender distinctions are on the whole natural, determined by the biological gender of the creature, e.g. actor, actress; hero, heroine. In some languages like French the gender distincti