Syntax

The syntax is the part of grammar that studies the rules and principles that govern the combination of syntactic constituents and the formation of units superior to these, such as phrases and grammatical sentences. Syntax, therefore, studies the ways in which words are combined, as well as the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships between them.

Structural Syntax

Syntax, for Leonard Bloomfield, was "the study of free forms composed entirely of free forms". Central to this theory of syntax were the notions of form classes (form classes) and constituent structure. (These notions were also relevant, though less central, in the theory of morphology.) Bloomfield defined form classes rather loosely, in terms of some "recognizable phonetic or grammatical feature common and shared by all members". He gave as examples the form classes consisting of "personal substantive expressions" of the English language (defined as "forms which, when expressed with final exclamatory tone, constitute requests (calls) for a person's presence or attention": for example "John", "Boy", "Mr. Smith"); the form classes consisting of “infinitive expressions” (defined as "forms which, when expressed with final exclamatory tone, have the meaning of a command: for example, "run", &# 34;jump", "come on"); the classes of the form of “nominative noun expressions” (for example: "John", "the boys") and so on. It should be clear from these examples that form classes are similar, though not identical, to traditional parts of speech, and that the same form may belong to more than one form class.

Substitutability

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What Bloomfield took into account as a criterion for form class membership (and therefore syntactic equivalence) could be better expressed in terms of substitutability. Class forms are sets of forms (whether simple or complex, free or bound), any one of which could be substituted for another in a given construction or set of constructions in all sentences of a given language.

Immediate constituents

Within sentences, words form hierarchical groupings called syntactic constituents. Obviously, not any set of words forms a constituent, but only those groupings that perform a recognizable syntactic function. In general, the constituents are formed by smaller constituents (except the terminal constituents, which generally coincide with words, affixes, or adpositions). Constituency tests help to identify what are the constituents of a sentence.

The above can be clarified with some examples. Thus, in the phrase poor Pablo is a construction analyzable in, or composed of, the constituents poor and Pablo. Since there is no intermediate unit of which poor and Paul were constituents and which is itself a constituent of the construction poor Pablo, the forms poor and Paul can be described not only as constituents but also as immediate constituents of poor Pablo.

Similarly, the phrase "lost his life" it is composed of three word-forms ("lost", "his" and "life") all of which could be described as constituents of the construction. Not all of those constituents, however, are its immediate constituents. The forms "su" and "life" combine to make the middle construction 'his life hers'; it is this intermediate unit that is combined with "lost" to form the broader phrase "lost his life". The immediate constituents of "lost his life" are "lost" and "his life"; the immediate constituents of "his life" are the forms "su" and "life". By constituent structure of a phrase or sentence is meant the organization of its smallest forms of which it is composed (its ultimate constituents) into layers of successively more inclusive units. Seen in this way, the sentence "Poor Pablo: he lost his life"; it is more than just a sequence of five words associated with a particular intonation pattern. It is analyzable into its immediate constituents, and so on, until, in the last step of parsing, the ultimate constituents of the sentence are reached. The constituent structure of the complete sentence is represented by the following scheme:

[chuckles]Poor Paul.]lost [chuckles]her life]

Every shape, whether simple or compound, belongs to a shape class. Using arbitrary letters selected to denote Spanish form classes, "pobre" can be a member of class of form A, "Paul" of class B, "lost" of class C, "su" of class D and "life" of class E. Since "poor Pablo" is syntactically equivalent to (ie, substitutable for) "Paul", it is to be classified as a member of A. So it is also, it can be assumed, & # 34; his life of him & # 34;. In the case of & # 34; he lost his life & # 34; If there is a problem. There are many forms (including "lost", "dealt" and "exported") that could occur, as here, in constructs with a member of B and that they can also occur alone; for example, "lost his life" is substitutable for "exported cocaine", since "exported" is substitutable for "lost" and "cocaine" for "his life". This being the case, it could be decided to classify constructions of the type "lost his life" as members of C. On the other hand, there are forms that —although they are substitutable for "lost", "distributed, exported" and so on when these forms occur alone—cannot be used in combination with a following member of B (cf. "died", "existed"); and there are forms which, though they may be used with a following member of B, cannot occur alone (cf. "possessed"). The question is whether or not the traditional distinction between transitive and intransitive verb forms is respected. It could thus be decided that it "lost", "distributed", "exported", etc. belong to a class: C (the class to which "owned" belongs), when they occur "transitively" (that is, with a next member of B as its object) but to a different class, F (the class to which "died" belongs), when "intransitively". Finally, it can be said that the complete sentence & # 34; Poor Pablo: he lost his life & # 34; is a member of the form class G. Thus, the constituent structure not only of "Poor Pablo: he lost his life"; but rather a whole set of Spanish sentences can be represented by means of the following scheme:

G([B(AB)]F(CB[DE])

New sentences of the same type can be built by substituting real forms for the class tags.

Syntactic Trees

Syntactic tree, for a composite prayer (The child who greeted me hates me) in which the subordinate prayer is a relative prayer.

Given a sentence, it can be divided into syntactic constituents, each of which, in turn, is divisible into other constituents. The set of syntactic constituents supported by the binary relation of inclusion (or "being a part of") is a partially ordered set. A syntax tree is a representation of the hierarchical relationships between syntactic constituents. More formally, a syntax tree is a graph that represents this partial order relationship.

When in a construction a constituent X is part of an immediate constituent of another larger constituent Y, the corresponding syntactic tree will have a line between the node representing X and the node representing Y. It is now accepted that every language supports an analysis by means of binary syntactic trees. In the graphics trees the syntactic nuclei are usually represented with a letter, for example Xfollowed by a subscript (for example X0{displaystyle scriptstyle {X}_{0}}}), while the most complex structures are indicated by one or two overlapping bars or by premiums (e.g., X! ! ,X! ! ! ! ,X♫,X♫{displaystyle scriptstyle {bar {X}},{bar {bar {X}}}},X',X'}) and if it is the maximum projections of a core by means of letters S preceded by the letter that designates the kernel (for example SX).

Endocentric and Exocentric Constructions

Any construction that belongs to the same class form as at least one of its immediate constituents is classified as endocentric; the only endocentric construction in the above model sentence ('poor Pablo: he lost his life') is 'poor Pablo'. All other constructions, according to this analysis, are exocentric. This is clear from the fact that in the above scheme the letters in the knots at the top of each sentence other than A + B (for example, "poor Pablo", "old Popeye", etc) are different from any of the letters at the ends of the lower branches directly connected to these knots. For example, the phrase D + E ("su reloj", "la cocina", etc.) has in its part immediately above a node labeled B, instead of D or E.

Types of endocentric constructs

Endocentric constructions are of two types: subordinate and coordinated. If attention is directed, for the sake of simplicity, to constructions composed of no more than two immediate constituents, subordinate constructions may be said to be those in which only one immediate constituent is of the same form class as the entire construction, whereas that coordinate constructions are those in which both constituents are of the same form class as the complete construction.

Head and modifier in syntactic equivalence

In a subordinate construction (for example, "poor Pablo"), the constituent that is syntactically equivalent to the full construction is known as the head, and its companion is known as its modifier: thus, in "poor Pablo", the form "Pablo" is the head, and "poor is its modifier. An example of a coordinated construction is men and women, in which, it can be assumed, the immediate constituents are the word men and the word women, each of which is syntactically equivalent to men and women. (It is implied here that the conjunction and is not a constituent itself, but an element which, like the relative order of the constituents, indicates the nature of the construction in question. Not all linguists share this point of view.)

Ambiguous constructions

One reason to give theoretical recognition to the notion of constituent is that it helps to explain the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic example is the phrase old women and men, which can be interpreted in two different ways according to whether one associates "old men with women and men or simply with "men. Under the first of the two interpretations, the immediate constituents are women and men and old men; under the second, they are women and old men. The difference in meaning cannot be attributed to any of the ultimate constituents, but results from a difference in the way they are associated with one another. Ambiguity of this type is known as syntactic ambiguity. Not all syntactic ambiguity is satisfactorily explained in terms of constituent structure.

Nonstructural Relationships: Direction, Linkage, and Concordance

In addition to the constitution relations in the syntactic study of languages there are other relations not necessarily characterized by the partial order relation given by the constitution. Among these relationships are the grammatical agreement relationships by which two elements that are generally not adjacent and that are part of different phrases must agree (present a special mark that indicates that a certain linguistic category present in the two elements has the same "value& #3. 4;). Likewise, the rules of co-occurrence of pronouns and anaphoras and their antecedents can only be expressed in a simple way in terms of the relationship of rule. Both the rule and linkage relationships are associated with the c-command relationship.

Among non-structural relationships, there are syntactic distance dependencies. These relations require mechanisms or grammaticality restrictions more complex than the simple adjacency or constitution of syntactic elements. Among them we can cite:

• grammatical concordance
• Recruitment and ligation
• the theory of the abstract case
• those of a displaced element with its syntactic footprint.

Theoretical frameworks

For various authors, both functionalists and generators, the syntax operates through binary operations of combination of two functionally different elements. So all languages would have a binary type operation SX+SAnd→ → SZ{displaystyle SX+SYto SZ} in which any non-simple syntactic unit is decomponible in two parts, each of them, in principle with different functionalities and structure.

Generative Syntax

The current paradigm in the discipline is generative grammar, whose forms include transformational generative grammar that focuses on the analysis of syntax as a primitive and fundamental constituent of natural language.

Generative grammar does not focus its research on the description of sentences, but on how the human mind manages to generate and interpret them through a minimal and intentional system. The fundamental objective of generative grammar is the design of a formal device capable of explaining the generation of all sentences in human languages.

In practice, the structural description of sentences is usually done through bracketing or tree diagrams. Both schemes reflect the structural hierarchy of the constituents of the sentence, while justifying (especially in the current minimalist Program) the linear order of the words.

The classic distinction of different syntactic categories cannot be rescued in most generative schools (lexical-functional grammar (LFG) considers that syntactic functions are primitives of syntax). This is because such analysis is considered merely descriptivist and taxonomic. Almost all generative currents operate with the different types of phrases that the lexical and functional nuclei of each language allow.

Functionalist Syntax

Studies of functional grammar are aimed at explaining how human language has developed as a communicative tool. Therefore, the syntax (and the rest of the linguistic components) are supposed to reflect some communicative functionality in their design. Michael Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Robert Van Valin's Grammar of Paper and Reference are examples of this type of linguistic orientation.