2015-07-21
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SYNTAX AS A BRANCH OF LINGUISTICS
Syntax as part of grammar.
The subject matter of Syntax. Syntax deals with combinability of words, i.e.how words are combined to make meaningful utterances, what patterns they combine on, and what abstract grammatical meaning they express.
The main objectives of Syntax are:
1) to study relations between words within word combinations;
2) to study the sentence as a structural unit which communicates a message in a
definite situation.
The units of syntactic analysis are the sentence and the phrase. They represent different levels of a hierarchy. From the constructive point of view both the sentence and the phrase are groups of elements related with each other and organised in a definite way. In most respects, however, the sentence and the phrase differ. The sentence the phrase – expresses a ‘complete thought’– Has a nominative function – is a name of a type of real life situations/– Doesn’t express a ‘complete thought’ – Has a nominative function – is a complex name of discrete objects of events – Has a certain intonation pattern– Is a minimal communicative unit of speech – Realises Predication (Modality,Temporality, Personality)
reality or of elements of real life situations
– Does not have intonation
– Is part of a communicative unit of speech
– Doesn’t realise Predication
PHRASE SYNTAX
o Definitions of the phrase.
o Traditionally the phase is defined as a group of two or more notional words
functioning as a whole. Besides notional words, a phrase may contain one or
more function words.
o A phase is a grammatical and semantic unit.
o Differences in phrase structure show up in differences of meaning.
o A phrase has a grammatical structure as words in it are syntactically related.
o The two basic types of syntactic relations between words in a phrase:
coordination and subordination
Coordinative phrases Subordinative phrases the main type of phrase in any language
– The elements are equal in their status
– The elements are not equal in their status: a head word + one or more adjuncts
– Are used to expand sentence components but not to build the structure of the sentence
– Are built either (1) with the help of conjunctions expressing coordination (? the relation is formally marked) or (2) without conjunctions
– Are used to build the structure of the sentence
– Are built either (1) with the help of prepositions expressing subordination (? the dependence is formally marked) or (2) without prepositions
The major criteria for classifying subordinative phrases:
1) the lexical grammatical class (part of speech) of the head word
noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases;
2) the degree of semantic fusion between the elements free phrases and phraseological units;
3) subtypes of syntactic relations variants of Subordination: Agreement, Government, Adjoinment.
Agreement is the morphologically marked variant of subordination, i.e. the
dependent element shares the morphological categories of the head word.
Agreement is not very common on the phrase level in English.
Government in English is mostly prepositionally (syntactically) marked.
Adjoinment is formally unmarked. The word position in a phrase and se-
mantic correlation matter. The main and most common variant of subordination
in English where the word order is fixed.
o ‘Chains’ of phrases? more complex constructions, where one phrase is embedded in another phase, or where multiple embedding occurs.
3. Causes and ways of borrowings
In its 15 century long history recorded in written manuscripts the English language happened to come in long and close contact with several other languages, mainly Latin, French and Old Norse (or Scandinavian). The great influx of borrowings from these sources can be accounted for by a number of historical causes. Due to the great influence of the Roman civilization Latin was for a long time used in England as the language of learning and religion. Old Norse was the language the conquerors who were on the same level of social and cultural development and who merged rather easily with the local population in the 9th, 10th ant the first half of the 11th century. French (to be more exact its Norman dialect) was the language of the other conquerors who brought with them a lot of new notions of a higher social system – developed feudalism, it was the language of upper classes, official documents and school instruction from the middle of the11th century to the end of the 14th
century. In the study of the borrowed elements in English the main emphasis is as a rule placed on the Middle English period. Borrowings of the later periods became the object of investigation only in recent years. This investigations have shown that the flow of borrowings has been stead and uninterrupted. The greatest number has come from French. They refer to various fields of social – political, scientific and the cultural life. A large portion of borrowings (41%) is scientific and technical terms. The number and character of borrowed words tell us of the relations between peoples, the level of their culture, etc. It is for this reason that borrowings have often been called the milestones of history. Thus if we go through the lists of borrowings in English and arrange them in groups according to their meaning, we shall be able to obtain much valuable information with regard to England’s contacts with many nations. Some borrowings, however, cannot be explained by the direct influence of certain historical conditions, they do not come along with any new objects or ideas. Such were for instance the words air, place, brave, gay borrowed from French. It must be pointed out that while the general historical causes of borrowing from different languages have been studied with a considerable degree of thoroughness the purely linguistic reasons for borrowing are still open to investigation. The number and character of borrowings do not only depend on the historical conditions, on the nature and length of the contacts, but also on the degree of the genetic and structural proximity of languages concerned. The closer the languages, the deeper and more versatile is the influence. This largely accounts for the well – marked contrast between the French and Scandinavian influence.
The Native element:
I. Indo-European element
II. Germanic element
III. English proper element (brought by Angles, Saxons and Jutes not earlier than 5 th c.
A.D.)
The Borrowed Element:
I. Celtic (5-6 th c. A.D.)
II. Latin: 1 st group: B.C.
2 nd group: 7 th c. A.D.
3d group: the Renaissance period
III. Scandinavian (8-11 th c. A.D.)
IV. French: 1. Norman borrowings (11-13th c. A.D.); 2. Parisian borrowings
(Renaissance)
V. Greek
VI. Italian (Renaissance and later)
VII. Spanish (Renaissance)
VIII. German
IX. Indian and others
4. Traditionally grammar is divided into two parts: morphology (the
grammar of words) and syntax (the grammar of the sentence). The role of these parts in the grammatical structure of different languages is different and depends on the type of the language.
The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of the language (not a part of the word), which as it appears may be larger than a word in the case of analytical forms of words.
Like the phoneme, the morpheme is always an abstraction and presents a
sum of its variants which are called allomorphs.
2. Grammatical meaning (further referred to as GM) can be defined as a
general abstract meaning which unites classes of forms or words and finds its
expression through formal markers thus placing a linguistic unit in a
grammatical category or a grammatical class of words (a part of speech).
The paradigmatic meaning is the primary, invariant, context-independent
1. Parts of speech occupy the central position in the language system as
they present the meeting point of the two main domains of the language: its
lexicon and grammar. Therefore they are indispensable for both the theory of the
language and the language acquisition. It is impossible to present a word in a
dictionary without placing it into a certain part of speech. Nor is it possible to
explain the meaning of a word in the process of teaching a language, especially
a foreign language without identifying its part-of-speech belonging.
2. The word, like any unit of language, possesses three main aspects:
meaning, form and function. None of these three aspects taken isolatedly from
the other two appears to be sufficient. The most adequate classification should
be based on the combination of these three aspects of a word, therefore most of
the classifications presented by grammarians are poly differential.
3. The development of cognitive linguistics which considers linguistic
phenomena as representations of cognitive structures and which states that
language as the totality of all its elements reflects the conceptual picture of the
world brought about the necessity to analyze the parts of speech from the
cognitive point of view. Considered from this aspect parts of speech are
considered to be the main vectors through which the humans perceive, cognize
and verbalize the world and their place in it. The cognitive approach to the
analysis of linguistic fact is closely related to the communicative approach, as
the cognitive function of language is correlated with its communicative
function- language is a means of forming, storing and transmitting information
(knowledge) in the process of communication. The cognitive approach to parts
of speech, at least in this country, came as the further development of the
onomasiological approach which focused on the correlation between parts of
speech and the phenomena of the world (words were treated as entities reflecting
the objective world) [Кубрякова 1978]. The object of analysis in cognitive
linguistics is ‘the world in our minds’, i.e. the conceptual picture of the world.
Analyzed from the cognitive point of view parts of speech are treated as
linguistic units which are correlated with certain structures of knowledge and
which reflect this knowledge in their categorial semantics. On the other hand
parts of speech are created for their further participation in the process of
communication. Cognitive linguistics treats parts of speech as special cognitive-
discursive units which represent the two main aspects of language - cognitive
and discursive (communicative) which are closely correlated and which have a
deep conceptual basis. The attribute ‘cognitive’ implies that parts of speech are
related to psychic, mental and cognitive processes and primarily to certain
structures of knowledge and present the projection of the conceptual picture of
the world into the system of language. The term ‘discursive’ implies the other
main aspect of parts of speech: they are created to participate in the process of
communication and therefore are projected into certain positions in the structure
of the sentence as the main unit of communication.
meaning of a grammatical form. Syntagmatic meanings are secondary, variant,
context-dependent meanings.
3. The grammatical meaning finds its expression in a grammatical form
which can be defined as a means of expressing a grammatical meaning.
4. The grammatical category as “a system of expressing a generalized
grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical
forms.
5. Systems of heterogeneous means of the language constituted on the basis of
common semantic contents (a common semantic function) are called functional-
semantic categories.
5. The alternation of words and their grammar forms is to be used in sentences.
Besides the syntactic factor the main factor that turns a word or a group of words
into a sentence is intonation. It is present in every sentence because words in the
sentence conditions are pronounced with certain tone, timbre, voice, loudness and
duration. These features are called supra-segmental or prosodic characteristics of
speech. The term “prosody” embraces such notions as pitch, loudness, tempo and substitutes the term “intonation”.
The basic prosodic features of the sentence are: speech melody, sentence
accent, tempo, voice, timbre, rhythm, pausation. Intonation together with the
proper choice of grammar structure is the main constituent feature of the sentence.
So the major function of intonation is therefore sentence constitutive.
Simultaneously it performs the sentence distinctive function. It can be proved
by the following personal observations: a) intonation gives the final expression to
the sentence; b) changes in the components of intonation alter the communicative
type of the sentence. E.g. “You have a personal objection to her” (falling tone –
statement; rising – general question). “Remove the luggage” (falling tone – order;
rising – polite request). It is seen from these examples that intonation alongside
with a sentence constitutive function performs the sentence distinctive function
simultaneously. It also has the recognitive function. Intonation can give the
sentence emotional colouring expressing joy, sorrow, anger, doubt. So it has a
clearly felt attitudinal function.
M.V. Lomonosov was the first to raise intonation problems and to solve
them to a certain extend in his “Russian Grammar”. In the 18 th and at the beginning of the 19 th century the problems of intonation were worked out by the Russian scientists Sokolov and Vostokov. At the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century intonation began to be studied on the experimentally. V.O. Bohorodytskyi who studied intonation by experimental method laid stress on the importance of the semantic function of intonation. A valuable contribution to acomparative study of intonation in Russian and French was made by Shcherba, who also pointed out the semantico-syntactical function of intonation. Russian and Ukrainian phoneticians such as Vasiliev, torsuev, Antipova, Brovchenko and others treat intonation as a unity of several components. They state that on the perceptual level intonation is a complex unity of voice pitch or speech melody, the prominence of words or their accent, the tempo, rhythm and pausation of the utterance, voice timbre serving to express adequately on the basis of the proper grammatical structure and lexical composition of the sentence the speaker’s thoughts, volition, emotions, feelings and attitudes towards reality and the contents of the sentence.
This definition of intonation differs radically from the point of view expressed by the overwhelming majority of foreign linguists who mostly reduce intonation to only one its component namely variations in voice pitch (intonation = speech melody). Lilies Armstrong and Ida Ward in the work “The Handbook of English Intonation” defined intonation as follows, “By intonation we mean the rise and fall of the pitch of the voice when we speak”. D. Jones in his work “An Outline of English Phonetics” writes, “Intonation may be defined as the variations which take place in the pitch of the voice in connected speech”. A.C. Glimson in his “Introduction to the Pronunciation in English” also interprets intonation as rises
and falls in pitch level. It is quite evident that the above mentioned definitions view
intonation in the narrow meaning and do not embrace the whole phenomenon of
intonation. It should be pointed out that the above mentioned linguists recognize
the inseparable connection between what they call “intonation” and “stress”. The
same point of view is shared by American descriptivists who also speak of stress
and intonation as closely connected with each other but also do not consider stress
as a component of intonation.
Most books on Phonetics by foreign linguists point out the importance of
some other factors such as rhythm, pausation which they don’t consider absolutely
necessary for semantic purposes and thus do not include them in the notion of
intonation. In spite of the above mentioned shortcomings some books on English
intonation find a wide practical application. To them above all belong Harold
Palmer’s “English intonation” and “A New Classification of English Tones” which
give a detailed description of the variety of tones used in English and state their
semantic functions. The books are supplied with numerous exercises. R. Kingdon
worked out the system of tonetic stress-marks.
6. Word formation is the creation of new words from elements already
existing in the language. Every language has its own structural patterns of word formation. Productivity is the ability to form new words after existing patterns which are readily understood by the speakers of a language. Synchronically the most important and the most productive ways of word-formation are affixation, conversion, word- composition and abbreviation (contraction). In the course of time the productivity of this or that way of word-formation may change. Sound interchange or gradation (blood - to bleed, to abide -abode, to strike - stroke) was a productive way of word building in old English and is important for a diachronic study of the English language. It has lost its productivity in Modern English and no new word can be coined by means of sound gradation. Affixation on the contrary was productive in Old English and is still one of the most productive ways of word building in Modern English.
Affixation is the formation of new words with the help of derivational affixes.
Suffixation is more productive than prefixation. In Modern English suffixation is a characteristic of noun and adjective formation, while prefixation is typical of verb formation (incoming, trainee, principal, promotion).
Affixes are usually divided into living and dead affixes. Living affixes are
easily separated from the stem (care-ful). Dead affixes have become fully merged with the stem and can be singled out by a diachronic analysis of the development of the word (admit - L.- ad + mittere). Living affixes are in their turn divided into productive and non-productive affixes. In many cases the choice of the affixes is a mean of differentiating of meaning: uninterested - disinterested distrust – mistrust.
Word-composition is another type of word-building which is highly productive. That is when new words are produced by combining two or more stems. Stem is that part of a word which remains unchanged throughout its paradigm and to which grammatical inflexions and affixes are added. The bulk of compound words is motivated and the semantic relations between the two components are transparent.
Compound words proper are formed by joining together stems of words already available in the language. Compound proper is a word, the two Immediate Constituents of which are stems of notional words, e.g. ice-cold (N + A), ill-luck(A+N).
Derivational compound is a word formed by a simultaneous process of
composition and derivation. Derivational compound is formed by composing a new stem that does not exist outside this pattern and to which suffix is added. Derivational compound is a word consisting of two Immediate Constituents, only one of which is a compound stem of notional words, while the other is a derivational affix, e.g. blue -eyed - (A+N) + ed In coordinative compounds neither of the components dominates the other, both are structurally and semantically independent and constitute two structural and semantic centres, e.g. breath-taking, self-discipline, word-formation.
Lecture III. Working Definitions of Principal Concepts
Conversion is a highly productive way of coining new words in Modern
English. Conversion is sometimes referred to as an affixless way of word-building, a process of making a new word from some existing root word by changing the category of a part of speech without changing the morphemic shape of the original
root-word. The transposition of a word from one part of speech into another brings about changes of the paradigm.
Conversion is not only highly productive but also a particularly English way of
word-building. It is explained by the analytical structure of Modern English and by the simplicity of paradigms of English parts of speech. A great number of one-syllable words is another factor that facilitates conversion.
Typical semantic relations within a converted pair
I. Verbs converted from noun (denominal verbs) denote:
1.action characteristic of the object ape (n) - to ape (v)
butcher (n) - to butcher (v)
2.instrumental use of the object screw (n) - to screw (v) whip (n) - to whip (v)
3.acquisition or addition of the object fish (n) - to fish (v)
II. Nouns converted from verbs (deverbal nouns) denote:
1. instance of the action:to jump (v) -jump (n); to move (v) - move (n)
2. agent of the action: to help (v) - help (n), to switch (v) - switch (n)
3. place of action: to drive (v) - drive (n), to walk (v) - walk (n)
4.object or result of the action: to peel (v) - peel (n), to find (v) - find (n).
7. While pronouncing words, we can distinguish syllables which are articulated with different degrees of prominence. Syllables given a special degree of prominence may occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of words. A greater degree of prominence given to one or more syllables in a word which singles it out through changes in the pitch and intensity of the voice and results in qualitative and quantitative modifications of sounds in the accented syllable is known as word accent. Languages differ from each other in the principal means by which the
special prominence of speech sounds is achieved and word accent thus effected.
One of such means is the pronunciation of a syllable in a word with greater force
of utterance as compared with that of the other syllables of the same word. Word
accent effected by these means is called dynamic or force stress. A syllable can
be made especially prominent by uttering each on a different pitch level than the
other syllable or syllables of the same word. Word accent effected by these means
is called musical or tonic accent. A syllable becomes more prominent when its
vowel is pronounced longer than another vowel or other vowels of the same
timbre. Word accent effected by these means is called quantitative accent. In
most languages stressed syllables are made prominent by the combination of
several all the above mentioned means. Scandinavian languages make use of both
dynamic stress and tonic accent in a more or less equal degree. Word accent in
English, German, French, Russian, and Ukrainian is traditionally considered to be
predominantly dynamic. Some oriental languages such as Japanese, Chinese,
Vietnamese as well as some African languages are regarded as having exclusively
or predominantly tonic word accent. In Japanese the sound sequence [hana] when
said with even tone, means “nose”, when higher tone on the first syllable –
“beginning”, when higher tone on the last syllable – “flower”.
Recent investigations of the acoustic nature of word accent in English and
Russian have shown that word stress in these languages is effected rather by
creating a definite pattern of relationships among all the syllables of every
disyllabic or polysyllabic word. From a purely phonetic point of view a
polysyllabic word has as many degrees of stress as there are syllables in it. For
example, Daniel Jones suggested the following distributions of stress in the word
“opportunity” […………….......]. Figure 1 denotes the strongest degree of stress.
The majority of British phoneticians distinguish three degrees of stress in English.
They call the strongest stress primary, the second strongest stress – secondary,
while all the other degrees of stress are called weak. The American descriptivists
(e.g. B. Block, J. Trager) denote a greater number of degrees of word stress
numbering them from 1 – loudest to 4 – weakest or calling them by descriptive
names such as loud, reduced-loud, medial, weak. They group the first three
together as strong. Some other American descriptivists (H.A. Gleason) distinguish
the following degrees of word stress: primary stress, secondary stress, tertiary
stress and four-weak stress. The distinction between secondary and tertiary
stresses is very subtle. The result is that the discrimination of these two degrees of
stress syllables in particular words is a subjective matter and even phonetically
trained linguists sometimes differ from each other in this respect.
Different types of word accent are distinguished according to its position.
From this point of view we can speak about fixed (ліс – лісу) and free (рука –
руку) word accent. Fixed word accent is characterized by the fixed position of
stress (French, Italian, Polish, Latin). Free word accent is characterized by the fact
that in different words of the language different syllables are stressed. Free word
accent has two sub-types: constant which always remains on the same
morpheme in different grammar forms of a word or in different derivatives from
the same root (wonder, wonderful, wonderfully); shifting accent is one which falls
on different morphemes in different grammatical forms of a word or in derivatives
from one and the same root (history – historical; active – activity; вовк – вовки).
Accent performs three basic functions:
1) constitutive, because it organizes a word as a complicated sound unit;
2) recognitive, as it helps to recognize words;
3) distinctive for it helps to distinguish words and their grammar forms
(import – import; produce – produce; perfect – perfect). It also helps to
distinguish compound words from word-combinations. According to V.A.
Vasiliev this distinctive function makes word accent a separate
phonological unit performing a sense-differentiating function. He calls it
accenteme. Thus there are word- and form-distinctive accentemes in
English, Russian and Ukrainian (мука – мука (w-d a.); руки – рука (f-da.).
In spite of the fact that word accent in English is free, the freedom of its
incidence is restricted by certain factors that determine the place and different
degrees of word accent. V.A. Vasiliev describes them as follows:
1) recessive tendency (tending to move away) – results in placing the
word accent on the initial syllable under the influence of the
Germanic tendency to stress the first syllable. Many English words
are of the Germanic origin (Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian). E.g.
father, mother, brother. Under the influence of this tendency words
of the Romanic origin (French) illustrate this tendency as well;
2) rhythmical tendency has caused the appearance in borrowed words
of many syllables of a secondary stress separated from the word
final principal stress by one unstressed syllable. E.g. the word
“radical” was borrowed from French. Later the word received the
recessive stress. Gradually the stress on the last syllable began to
weaken because it was contrary to the strong English tendency to
place the word accent on the fist syllable. This is an example of a
historical or diachronical rhythmical tendency. Nowadays there is a
genuine rhythmical stress in word of four or more syllables (e.g. in
the word “celebration”);
3) retentive tendency consists in the retention of the primary accent in
word derivations. E.g. norm – normal; person – personal;
4) the semantic factor plays an important role in the accentuation of
certain categories of words. For example in prefixed words in which
the prefix lost its meaning (become, before, behind, forever) the
stress falls on the root of the word, but there are words with prefixes
which have their own meaning. In such words the semantic factor
cancels the rhythmical tendency. The same is true with compound
words in which both elements are considered to be of equal semantic importance. The classes of double-stressed English words are:
a) words with the so called strong or separable prefixes: mis-
pronunciation, anti-revolutionary, non-party and some others:
disrespectful, unknown, to overwork, to underpay, to rewrite;
b) compound adjectives: dark-green, hardworking, blue-eyed;
c) phrasal verbs: come in, put off, bring up;
d) any numerals from 13 to 19 and compound numerals (23);
e) a small number of compound nouns consisting of two
elements of which the second element according to D. Jones
is felt to be of special importance: gas-stove, absent-
mindedness, eye-witness. In addition to double-stressed
compound nouns English has a greater number of compound
nouns with a single stress or so called unity stress:
blacksmith, greenhouse. It should be born in mind that when
words with double stress occur in actual speech the
rhythmical tendency becomes operative and one of the
stresses is inevitably lost. E.g. The girl is good-looking (if
adjective is used in final position, the first stress is lost). Cf.
She is a good-looking girl.
8. Proto-Indo-European language and comparative linguistics
When there are no documents of language to be traced the pre-written history of any language is studied by methods of comparative linguistics. It is 200 years old. It all started with a publication of an article by Franz Bopp (1816). The talk is about the so-called I-E language. It is now well-supported with evidence from many languages that there was a language spoken by people in pre-historic times. It was given a name Proto-Indo-European. There are 2 main problems. Actually, when and where it was spoken. The time can hardly be accurately dated. It is dated far back 10000 B.C. – 4000 B.C. In the 15th thousand B.C. I-E still existed and people spoke it. Why is it so? The most ancient languages are compared like the Hittite, Ancient Greek, Veda. It was found out that the difference between them is so much that the time period between them should be no less than 2000 years. In the 4th millennium B.C. P-I-E was dead. 10000 B.C. is the most probable time of existing P-I-E homeland. It is based upon linguistic and archeological facts.
Linguistic facts:
1) words denoting the sea (the root mor- denotes the water area)
2) names of the tress
3) names of the rulers
4) names of the devices for cultivating soil (the plough)
Archeological facts:
1) the crockery, the pots, the burial places
2) people in power were buried with what they possessed
3) tools made of stone and absence of metal
4) evidences of transition from gathering food to cultivating soil
5) megalithic culture. Pre-historic monuments were reconstructed with huge stones.
Marina Gimbutas writes that Indo-Europeans lived north-west of the Caucasus and north of the Caspian Sea as for Southern Urals. This result is supported by many scientists. Other locations have been proposed for I-E homeland:
- Northern Central Europe between the Vistula and the Elbe
- Modern Turkey
It was supported by Russians Camkelidze and Ivanov.
What happened to Latin?
Various migrations began. Indo-Europeans were driven from their original homeland to many parts of Europe and Asia. So P-I-E developed in different ways in the various parts of the world to each its speakers traveled. At the beginning of historical times languages that derived from it were spoken from Europe in the west to India in the east. P-I-E was the ancestor language of most of the Europe languages and many of those in South Asia. Its descendants make up the I-E family: Italic (Italian, French, Spanish) group, Balto-Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian), Indo-Iranian (Modern Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi), Germanic (English, German, Dutch and Flemish).
