4. syntax(配戴炜栋版语言学).docVIP

課 程 提 綱 課程名稱： 語言學概論 任課教師： 孟智君 課程性質： 院考試課 學 分： 4 教 材： 《新編簡明英語語言學教程》 Chapter 4. Syntax 1. What is syntax? ◆Syntax (句法學) is a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences. ◆The study of the interrelationship between sentential elements. 2. Transformational Generative Grammar (TG, 轉換生成語法) ◆Noam Chomsky, the most influential linguist in 20th century, some important works are the following: ◇ Syntactic Structure (1957) ◇ Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) ◇ Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) ◇ Barriers (1986) ◇ A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory (1993) ◇ The Minimalist Program (1995) ◇ The Minimalist Inquiry: The Framework (1998) ◆Criteria on good grammar ⒈Observational adequacy ⒉Descriptive adequacy ⒊Explanatory adequacy ⒋The ultimate goal for any theory is to explain ★ TG differs from traditional grammar in that it not only aims at language description, but also its explanation. ◆Chomsky is much more interested in the similarities (language universals) between languages rather than their differences. ◇ Linguists should attempt to find a grammatical framework which will be suitable for all languages. ◇ Linguists should concentrate on the elements and constructions that are available to all languages rather than on elements that actually occur in all languages. ◇ There are likely to be universal constraints on the ways linguistic elements are combined. ◇ Chomsky proposed that the grammars of human languages share a common framework (Universal Grammar). 3. Categories ◆Category (範疇) refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. ◆The most central categories to the syntactic study are the word-level categories (traditionally, parts of