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From: http://lingvistkalidus.webovastranka.cz/
8. WORD & SENTENCE GRAMMAR
Syntax
≈ Syntax (Greek) = arrangement, organization
- Grammar = also relationship in the internal structure of words, morphology + syntax
- Syntax look at the structure of sentences, doesn’t study text, relations between sentences
≈ Syntax means
- Word order, inflection, auxiliaries
≈ Sentence elements
- Centre – have to be present in every sentence; subject, predicate, object
- Periphery – you can choose to use them or not, up to the speaker, optional; modifiers
- Immediate constituents analysis
o “Poor John run away” - the lower level are single words (don’t divide into
morphemes) = ultimate constituents (“poor” – final indivisible element)– can’t be
analyzed further
≈ Surface X Deep structure = Chomsky
- Transformative grammar→ Generative transformative grammar→ Universal for all languages
– “Universal Grammar”
- Surface = what you can see (Bloomfield)
- Deep Structure = underline sentences, give meaning to the words
≈ Transformative rules – obligatory X optional
The man opened the door.
- no transformation
The man did not open the door.
- negative (Obligatory)
Did the man open the door?
- interrogative (Obligatory)
The door was opened by the man.
- passive (Optional – we keep the
meaning
Wasn’t the door opened by someone?
- pass., neg., interr.
Syntactic units
≈ Sentence = largest unit of grammatical description
- Highest – final ultimate unit
- We have no GRAMMATICAL rules for paragraphs, sentence is the highest unit
≈ Sentence types – Function & Structure
- Function
o Paradigmatic level
o Making statement
o Asking, explaining
o Declarative + Interrogative + Exclamatory + Imperative (secondary function = Can
function as declarative or polite request “Would you please leave the door?”)
- Structure
o Syntagmatic level
o Depends on the structure
o Simple and multiple (compound, complex)
o Clause = Subordinate (nominal “Whatever he did was wonderful”, adverbial “I’ll be
there when I’m ready” restrict the referential area of the word or use as
comparisons “He is not tall as I am”; adjectival “Whose people, who have not seen it
won’t believe it”), Main
- Question (it’s function) X Interrogative sentence (“Would you please leave the door?” – I’m
not asking a question; it’s type)
- Clause(“vedlejší věta”) – nominal, adjectival, adverbial
- Concord (“shoda”) & Government (regimen - “rekce”)
-1Slide 08
From: http://lingvistkalidus.webovastranka.cz/
o Concord= Relation between 2 or more words in different word classes that agree
(“He works”)
o Government = relationship between verb and pronoun (“I don’t understand him”
NOT “I don’t understand he”)
Sentence semantic
≈ Syntax – Semantics – Pragmatics
- Semantics = meaning (noun – subject – agent)
- Pragmatics = what I want to say, relationship between language user and language
≈ Language system X Language use
- System = represented by syntax as such formal relationship
- Use = how I use language, if you use the sentence you make it utterance
≈ Linguistic meaning – Cognitive content → Ambiguity X Indistinctness
- Linguist meaning = linguistic role at element in a sentence (e.g. subject)
- Cognitive content – without emotions (“poznávací obsah”)
- Ambiguity – structural (“mnohoznačnost”), you need the the sentence (context) to
understand the meaning
- Indistinctness – weakness of meaning (you need the context of the situation to interpret it
correctly (now – I can be interval of few weeks “I’m listening to Elvis” – you see that I don’t
have headphones – it’s not right know. If she writes “I’m listening to Elvis” you don’t know if
it’s now, or recently
≈ Sentence X Utterance
- Sentence – formally analyzing sentence – “věta”,
- Utterance – “výpověď, v kontextu, význam daný mluvčím”, concrete parole unit
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From: http://lingvistkalidus.webovastranka.cz/
Seminar
Functional sentence perspective
- FSP is further than semantics
- Syntax focuses only on a form
- Psychological suspect of a syntactic structure
- Dealing with utterance
Theme (2)
Given information
Rheme (1)
newest info
Transition (3)
-
Where (2) is (3) John (1) ?
John (1) went (3) home (1). → grammatical subject isn’t the psychological subject here
-
“čím vice vpravo, tím větší důležitost”
-
The righter you go, the more important info you get
Theme
Rheme
John (th)
-
has not been (th)
sleeping well (rh)
“Not” – “gramatické pravidlo, důležité not zůstává v méně důležité části”
FSP
1. Theme – grammatical subject
2. Rheme – psychological subject
3. CD – communicative dynamism (=degree of info value every sentence element carries)
CD is low
Where
CD is higher
is
John?
Transition – between Theme and Rheme, usually a verb
Where is John?
He went home.
Transition
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