Syntactic Analysis And Description

Aimed at undergraduate and beginning graduate students, this work covers the varieties of syntactic phenomena in different languages and a method of analyzing and describing them. This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students about the varieties of syntactic phenomena in different languages and a method of analyzing and describing them. The method is based on the concept of the syntactic construction, which is shared by various views of language structure. In this particular presentation, a construction is characterized as a combination of obligatory and optional functions, and each of these functions is related to a class of manifestations. Syntax as a whole is then seen as interrelating constructions on the ranks (size-levels) of the phrase, clause, and sentence.Besides the essential features of phrase, clause, and sentence structures, there are chapters devoted to special topics such as clitics, negation, clausal organization, and voice and related devices.While the emphasis is on the actual syntactic structures observable in the data, the relation of syntactic phenomena to linguistic meaning is also considered. In particular, the final chapter shows how account of syntax can often be simplified if control from meaning structure is assumed. Throughout the book, a distinction between meaningfulness and syntactic-well formedness is consistently made.

This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students how to understand, analyse and describe syntactic phenomena in different languages. This book is designed to teach undergraduate and beginning graduate students how to understand, analyse and describe syntactic phenomena in different languages. The book covers every aspect of syntax from the basics to more specialised topics, such as clitics which have grammatical importance but cannot be used in isolation, and negation, in which a construction contradicts the meaning of a sentence. The approach taken combines concepts from different theoretical schools, which view syntax differently. These include M. A. K. Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, the stratificational school advocated by Sydney Lamb, and Kenneth L. Pike's tagmemic model. The emphasis of the book is on syntactic structures rather than linguistic meaning, and the book stresses the difference between a well-formed sentence and a meaningful one. The final chapter brings these two aspects together, to show the connections between syntax and semology. Each chapter concludes with exercises from a diverse range of languages and a list of major technical terms. The book also includes a glossary as an essential resource for students approaching this difficult subject for the first time.