Syntax definition

by abdo Wed Apr 06, 2011 2:04 pm

Syntax

In [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], syntax
(from [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] "arrangement" from σύν syn,
"together", and τάξις táxis, "an ordering") is the
study of the principles and rules for constructing [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in natural
languages.

In addition to referring to
the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the
rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual
language, as in "the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]."

Modern research in syntax
attempts to [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] in terms of such rules.
Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general
rules that apply to all natural languages. The term syntax is also
used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such
as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], artificial formal
languages, and computer
programming languages.

Early history

Works on grammar were written
long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is often cited as an example of a
premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} In the
West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional
grammar" began with the work of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

For centuries, work in syntax
was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] 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 therefore 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 19th century,
with the development of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.],
linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to
question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and
logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way
to express a thought, and therefore logic could no longer be relied upon as a
basis for studying the structure of language.

The [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] modeled the study of syntax
upon that of logic (indeed, large parts of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] were
copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}).
Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were
analyzed in terms of "Subject – Copula – Predicate". Initially, this
view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].

The central role of syntax
within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th 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 [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (2001).

Modern theories

There are a number of
theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought,
founded in the works of Derek
Bickerton,^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
sees syntax as a branch of biology, since it conceives of syntax as the study
of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Other linguists (e.g. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) take a
more [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] view, since they regard
syntax to be the study of an abstract [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Yet others
(e.g. [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.])
consider grammar a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across
languages. Andrey
Korsakov's school of thought suggests [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
understanding of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
phenomena. At foundations of their [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] ideas, lies [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] which treats [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] as consisting of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], their [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] and
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].
From here the followers of Korsakov's school assert the subdivision of words by
the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
problems also get their enlightenment in the terms of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.].^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]} Some more
approaches to the discipline are listed below.

Generative grammar

Main
article: Generative
grammar

The hypothesis of generative
grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. The goal of
generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language (known as
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]).
This model could be used to describe all human language and to predict the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] of any
given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance would sound correct
to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]. Most
generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based upon
the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the
theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence, rather than its
communicative function.

Among the many generative
theories of linguistics, the Chomskyan theories are:

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (TG)
(Original theory of generative syntax laid out by Chomsky in Syntactic
Structures in 1957^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]})
Government
and binding theory (GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG
developed mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s).^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(MP) (a reworking of the theory out of the GB framework published by
Chomsky in 1995)^{[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]}

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

Generative
semantics (now largely out of date)
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
(RG) (now largely out of date)
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
Generalized phrase structure
grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
Head-driven
phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] (LFG)
[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Categorial grammar

Main
article: Categorial
grammar

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of grammar,
but to the properties of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] themselves. For example,
rather than asserting that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a
noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP) (e.g. the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] S → NP VP), in
categorial grammar, such principles are embedded in the category of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] word itself. So the syntactic category for
an [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] which requires an NP as
an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. This complex
category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is read as " a category
that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP (the element on the left)
and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] is
defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object)
to form a sentence. This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category
that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and
generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn
represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a
sentence).

Tree-adjoining
grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree
structures to the categories.

Dependency grammar

[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the
relations (such as [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) between a word (a [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]) and its dependents, rather than being
based in constituent structure. For example, syntactic structure is described
in terms of whether a particular [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
is the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.] or [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]
of the [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.], rather than
describing the relations in terms of phrases.