RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS CHAPTER 9 SYNTAX I

Syntax is the way words are put together to form phrases and sentences.
To study syntax is to study the patterns and relationships of words, phrases and clauses. Defining a Sentence The traditional definition of a sentence as a complete thought goes back to the ancient Indian and Greek grammarians, but the definition lacks persuasiveness. The definition of sentence became a real problem for the structural linguists; for they discovered that a sentence, per se, had little in the way of defining features. They adopted a very rough and dubious definition: a sentence was defined to be a stretch of speech between major pauses. When the transformation lists succeeded the structuralisms. They also made the sentence central to syntax; but their approach to a definition of a sentence was much simpler. In virtually the same way that the transformational-generative grammarians defined part of speech, they said that a sentence was whatever native speakers knew to be a sentence. The Traditional Approach to Syntax The best-known form of analysis is the Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram, which was used in most American public schools until the 1950s. The Reed-Kellogg sentence diagram is reasonably simple, and it provides a somewhat useful presentation of relationships within sentences. Reed-Kellogg diagrams provide a simple, pictorial view of sentence. Unfortunately, the Reed-Kellogg approach simply too simple. In effect, it cannot match the genuine complexities of English grammar. One result of the simplicity of traditional grammars was a contradiction between the rules and reality.

RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

Reed-Kellogg diagrams: Dog The chased brown continuosly cat the yellow

An unswerving loyalty to simplistic rules sometimes led traditional grammarians to startling conclusion. The following is taken from a traditional grammar: The subject of an infinitive is in the objective case: We asked him to go. (Him is the subject of to go) In an infinitive clause, a predicate noun . . . used after to be is in the objective case to agree with the subject of the infinitive: They took me to be her. If the infinitive to be has no subject, the predicate noun. . . following it is in the nominative case: He was thought to be I. [Walsh and Walsh 1972, pp. 53-54]

The Structuralist Approach In their through revision of syntactic theory, the structuralists replaced grammatical rules with sentence patterns and the Reed-Kellogg diagrams with immediateconstituent diagrams. A sentence pattern was a sequence of word classes and groups. One of the most common types of sentence patterns was the pattern: Group A --- Class I --- Class II --- Group A --- Class I Immediate-constituent analysis, too, was no improvement in the art of understanding organization within sentences. Generally speaking, immediate constituents were successive words that formed a unit.

in

the

eye

RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

The

girl

kicked

her

younger

brothe r

ferosiously

The Transformational-Generative Approach The stucturalists were primarily concerned with describing the sentence patterns in observed utterances. In contrast, Noam Chomsky and the transformational-generative grammarians are concerned with what a speaker knows about the sentences of his or her language; that is, the unconscious ability to interpret and produce sentences that the person may have never before heard. Performance and Competence Performance means the actual saying of something, or the act of speech itself. Ideally, we would like to be able to account for the speakers performance, but there are formidable obstacles. In the act of speech, a speaker is responding to the environment, which is usually of extreme complexity and for which we have few descriptive tools. The speaker is responding also to a mental state. Competence is an essential part of performance. It is the speakers knowledge of his or her language; that is, of its sound structure, its words, and its grammatical rules. Competence is, in a way, an encyclopedia of the language. If competence is an encyclopedia of the language, the speaker must also know the rules governing us of the encyclopedia. Such rules are performance strategies called heuristics, and linguists as yet do little more than guess at the forms they might take.

RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

PERFORMANCE Memory mood intentions Speech mechanism

heuristics COMPETENCE

A Model of Competence The transformational-generative linguists have taken it upon themselves to give an account of competence; that is to determine what the rules are that underline a language and how they work together to create the sentences of the language. An alternative view originated by such linguists as George Lakoff, james McCawley, Paul Postal, John Ros is called generative semantics. COMPETENCE

Semantic rules

Syntactic rules

Phonological rules

SYNTAX
Base omponent Phrase structural rules Lexicon

Deep structures
Transformational component

Transformational rules

RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

Surface structures Phrase-Structure Grammar A phrase structure grammar is a series of rewrite rules. These rules break down sentences, establishing their basic structure, regardless of the final form the sentences may take after transformational rules have applied. Each rule in a phrase-structure grammar has the form : XY+Z It means X consist of Y and Z. No complete phrase-structure grammar for English has yet been fully accepted. It is possible that none ever will be, for the phrase-structure rules depend in part on the theories that underlie them. For this structure grammar we can use a tree diagram that the form of the rule.

Lexical Insertion Lexical insertion is an extremely important part of the grammar, for no sentences can make sense without word. In the lexicon all relevant information is incoporated in features. Lexicon will contain a phonological representation, given distinctive features, for each word. It will also contain two kinds of features that are important: syntactic features and semantic features.

RANTI FITRI ANWAR / 1106033 NK-1

Sytantic features are those aspects of a word that a govern its use in structures. The most important of these syntactic faetures is the part of speech. This feature that disallows the use of destroy when a noun is expected. Semantic features are features that specify certain semantic requirements of words. For instance, it is a syntactic requirement that the verb see have a subject NP, but it is a semantic requirement tht this subject NP must be something capabe of seeing. Semantic features are not unconditionally binding, as are syntactic features. In fact, many sentences ogf English involve semantic mismatches, and many of these are considered metaphors. Lexicon must somehow indicate the meaning of words. Mostly grammarians have taken it for garnted that do know the meanings of words, generally they have not dealt sufficiently with the defitional part of the lexicon.