英语专业语言学课件.ppt

Chapter4 Syntax What is syntax? It studies how words are combined to form sentences and the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures. Syntactic relations Positional relation refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language. Relation of substituability refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in the same sentence structures. Relation of co-occurrence: a word of one set may permit the occurence of a word of another set to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Construction and constituent Endocentric and exocentric construction Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, which serves as a center or head. Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole. There is no center or head. Coordinate and subordinate construction boys and girls coffee or tea Tom loves Mary and Mary loves Tom too. two dogs swimming in the lake hot beyond endurance can drink Exercises Draw a tree diagram The student wrote a letter yesterday. The man beat the boy with a stick. Flying planes can be dangerous. Headed or non-headed His son will be keenly competing. Ducks quack. The ladder in the shed is long enough. I saw a bridge damaged beyond repair. Singing hymns is forbidden in some countries. His handsome face appeared in the magazine. He enjoys climbing high mountains. The man nodded patiently. A man roused by the insult drew his sword. Chomsky and transformational-generative grammar Chomskys innateness hypothesis Phrase structure rules Transformational rules Chomskys innateness hypothesis Children learn their native language very fast and with little effort. Children learn their mother tongue in very different environments. But they follow more or less the same stages in acquisition. Children can not only produce and understand