Basic syntactic notions

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1433.

General characteristics

SYNTAX. BASIC NOTIONS.

1. General characteristics of syntax.

2. Basic syntactic notions.

3. Syntactic relations.

The grammatical structure of language comprises two major parts – morphology and syntax. The two areas are obviously interdependent.

Morphology deals with paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties of morphological units – morphemes and words.

It is concerned with the internal structure of words and their relationship to other words and word forms within the paradigm.

It studies morphological categories and their realization.

Syntax, on the other hand, deals with the way words are combined.

It is concerned with the external functions of words and their relationship to other words within the linearly ordered units – word-groups, sentences and texts.

Syntax studies the way in which the units and their meanings are combined. It also deals with peculiarities of syntactic units, their behavior in different contexts.

The syntactic language level can be described with the help of special linguistic terms and notions: syntactic unit, syntactic form, syntactic meaning, syntactic function, syntactic position, and syntactic relations.

Syntactic unit is always a combination that has at least two constituents. The basic syntactic units are a word-group, a clause, a sentence, and a text. Their main features are:

a) they are hierarchical units – the units of a lower level serve the building material for the units of a higher level;

b) as all language units the syntactic units are of two-fold nature: side of content and side of expression (form and meaning);

c) they are of communicative and non-communicative nature – word-groups and clauses are of non-communicative nature while sentences and texts are of communicative nature.

Syntactic meaning is the way in which separate word meanings are combined to produce meaningful word-groups and sentences.

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence is quite correct grammatically. However it makes no sense as it lacks syntactic meaning.

Syntactic formmay be described as the distributional formula of the unit (pattern). John hits the ball – N1 + V + N2.

Syntactic functionis the function of a unit on the basis of which it is included to a larger unit: in the word-group a smart student the word ‘smart' is in subordinate attributive relations to the head element. In traditional terms it is used to denote syntactic function of a unit within the sentence (subject, predicate, etc.).

Syntactic positionis the position of an element. The order of constituents in syntactic units is of principal importance in analytical languages. The syntactic position of an element may determine its relationship with the other elements of the same unit: his broad back, a back district, to go back, to back sm.

Syntactic relationsare syntagmatic relations observed between syntactic units. They can be of three types – coordination, subordination and predication.