英语语言学Chapter4gram.pptVIP

Chapter FourFrom Word to Textsyntax 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 analyzed into three kinds: relations of position relations of substitutability relations of co-occurrence 1.1 Relations of Position 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 who started the structural approach to the analysis of language. They are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations. The relation between one item and others in a sequence. 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 These words are said to be in the relation of substitutibility. 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. The relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in