Reference.com

Syntax

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

“Syntactic” redirects here. For another meaning of the adjective, see Syntaxis
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, “together”, and τάξις táxis, “arrangement”) are the rules of a language that show how the words of that language are to be arranged to make a sentence of that language. The term syntax can also be used to refer to these rules themselves, as in "the syntax of Gaelic". Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules, and, for many practitioners, to find general rules that apply to all languages. Since the field of syntax attempts to explain grammatical judgments, and not provide them, it is unconcerned with linguistic prescription.

Though all theories of syntax use humans as their object of study, there are some significant differences in outlook. Many linguists (e.g. Noam Chomsky) see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, regarding syntax as the study of an abstract formal system. ; others also (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar as a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations among languages.

Early history

Works on grammar were of course being written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a pre-modern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory. In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as ‘traditional grammar’ began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.

For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and hence there is a single most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.

However, in the 19 century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question fundamental assumptions about the relation between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and logic could no longer be relied upon as a base for studying the structure of language.

The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax on that of logic (indeed, large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale). Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analysed into the form "Subject-Copula-Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists (e.g., Bopp).

The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the last century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries see the monumental work by Graffi 2001.

Modern theories

Generative grammar

Generative grammar hypothesizes that language is a mental structure of the human mind. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner-language (or i-language) which could be used to describe all human speech, and predict the grammaticality of any given speech utterance (that is, whether speech would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based in constituent structure. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of the sentence rather than the function.

Among the many Chomskyan generative theories of linguistics are:

Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:

HPSG and LFG also fall in the category of unification grammars.

Categorial grammar

Categorial grammar is an approach that focuses on the combinatoric properties of categories. For example, an intransitive verb has the property that it requires a noun phrase (NP) to complete it and the result is a sentence (S) thus the category of such a verb is NPS (in one notation).

Dependency grammar

Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents rather than being based in constituent structure.

Some dependency-based theories of Syntax

Stochastic/Probabilistic grammars/Network Theories

Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based in probability theory are known as stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a Neural network or Connectionism. Some theories based in this are:

Functionalist grammars

Functionalist theories, although concerned about form, are driven by explanation based in the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories include:

See also

Syntactic terms

Notes

References

  • Brown, Keith; Jim Miller (eds.) (1996). Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. New York: Elsevier Science.
  • Freidin, Robert; Howard Lasnik (eds.) (2006). Syntax. New York: Routledge.
  • Graffi, Giorgio (2001). 200 Years of Syntax. A Critical Survey. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • Ottenhiemer, Harriet (2006). The Anthropology of Language- An Introduction To Linguistic Anthropology.
  • Witzany, Guenther. (1995) "From the 'logic of the molecular syntax' to molecular pragmatism." Evolution & Cognition 1: 148–168.

External links



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Tuesday March 11, 2008 at 14:00:20 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation