- “Syntactic” redirects here. For another meaning of the adjective, see Syntaxis
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek
συν- syn-, “together”, and τάξις táxis, “arrangement”) is the study of the rules that govern the structure of
sentences, and which determine their relative grammaticality. The term syntax can also be used to refer to these rules
themselves, as in “the syntax of a language”. 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 grammaticality 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. Modern
linguists see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the
human mind/brain. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, regarding syntax as the study of an abstract formal system. [1]; others also (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar as a
taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations among languages.
Substitution Frames
Substitution frames are grammatical frames into which you can place related words. These frames can prove very useful in
learning the syntax of a new language. Here are some examples of substitution frames:
the bird in the tree, the dog in the tree, the cat in the tree,
the bird in the tree, the dog on the tree, the cat under the tree,
the bird on the tree, the bird in a tree, a bird in a tree, a bird in the tree,
What we can determine by the content of the substitution frames tells us something about the syntax of that language. First
off, it tells us about the grammatical categories that exist in the given language. From our
examples, it shows us that "bird", "dog", and "cat" are words that belong to a specific grammatical category. It does the same
thing for "in", "on" and "under". To make these categories easier to define, we would call the first group "nouns" and the second group "prepositions". This enables us to categorize
words based on their appropriate labels.
In cases where there are two types different types of nouns, we would categorize one type as "subject
nouns" and the other type as "object nouns". This would eliminate the problem of having
the wrong order of nouns if one were using substitution frames to determine where to place a word in order to be grammatically
correct.
Knowing another languages' substitution frames and categories of words, is helpful in learning the language because it offers
a template of how the speakers structure their language. For example, in
English you would say, "I like pizza." Literally translated syntax in Japanese would be, "I pizza like." The placement of the
nouns and prepositions would not make sense if one literally translated this phrase without knowledge of the syntax of the given
language. Studying and testing a languages' substitution frames can aid in this process.
Be aware that different languages may have very different substitution frames. This being said, be cautious not to rush into
labeling your categories and keep an open mind as you encounter complexities. (Ottenhiemer, pp.-72-75)
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.[1] 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 that hence there is a single most natural way to
express a thought (which, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French).
However, in the 19th 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[2]). 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 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 constitutes one of the most innovative ideas in linguistics
since its origin. There are two features shared by most theories of formal syntax. First, they hierarchically group subunits into
constituent units (usually referred to as phrases). Second, they provide a system of rules to
explain why certain utterances seem more acceptable or grammatical than others. Most formal theories of syntax also offer
explanations of the systematic relationships between syntax and semantics, in other words,
between form and meaning.
-
In the framework of transformational-generative grammar (of which
government and binding theory and minimalism are recent
developments), the structure of a sentence is represented by phrase structure
trees, otherwise known as phrase markers or tree diagrams. Such trees provide information about the sentences
they represent by showing the hierarchical relations between their component parts. Dependency grammar is a different type of generative grammar in which structure is determined by the
relation between a word (a head) and its dependents. One difference from phrase structure grammar is that dependency grammar does
not have phrasal categories. Algebraic syntax is a type of dependency
grammar.
A modern approach to combining accurate descriptions of the grammatical patterns of language with their function in context is
that of systemic functional grammar, an approach originally developed by
Michael A.K. Halliday in the 1960s. Systemic-functional grammar is related both to feature-based approaches such as Head-driven
phrase structure grammar and to the older functional traditions of European schools of linguistics such as British Contextualism
and the Prague School.
Tree-adjoining grammar is a grammar formalism with interesting mathematical
properties which has sometimes been used as the basis for the syntactic description of natural language. In monotonic and
monostratal frameworks, variants of unification grammar are often preferred formalisms.
With the publication of Gold's Theorem[3] 1967 it was
claimed that grammars for natural languages governed by deterministic rules could not be learned based on positive instances
alone. This was part of the argument from the poverty of stimulus, presented in
1980[4] and implicit since the early works by Chomsky of
the 1950s. This led to the nativist view, that a form of grammar (including a
complete conceptual lexicon in certain versions) were hardwired from birth.
A grammar is a description of the syntax of a language. Theoretical models rarely consider the language in use, as revealed by
corpus linguistics, but focus on a mental language or i-language as its "proper" object of study. In contrast, the "empirically responsible"[5] approach to syntax seeks to construct grammars that will
explain language in use. A key class of grammars in the latter tradition are the stochastic context-free grammars.
A problem faced in any formal syntax is that often more than one production rule may apply to a structure, thus resulting in a
conflict. The greater the coverage, the higher this conflict, and all grammarians (starting with Panini) have spent considerable effort devising a prioritization for the rules, which usually turn out to be
defeasible. Another difficulty is overgeneration, where unlicensed structures are also generated. Probabilistic grammars
circumvent these problems by using the frequency of various productions to order them, resulting in a "most likely"
(winner-take-all) interpretation, which by definition, is defeasible given additional data. As usage patterns are altered in
diachronic shifts, these probabilistic rules can be re-learned, thus upgrading the grammar.
One may construct a probabilistic grammar from a traditional formal syntax by assigning each non-terminal a probability taken
from some distribution, to be eventually estimated from usage data. On most samples of broad language, probabilistic grammars
that tune these probabilities from data typically outperform hand-crafted grammars (although some rule-based grammars are now
approaching the accuracies of PCFG).
Recently, probabilistic grammars appear to have gained some cognitive plausibility. It is well known that there are degrees of
difficulty in accessing different syntactic structures (e.g. the Accessibility
Hierarchy for relative clauses). Probabilistic versions of minimalist grammars have been used to compute information-theoretic entropy values which appear to correlate well with psycholinguistic data on understandability and production
difficulty.[6]
Statistical grammars are not subject to Gold's theorem since the learning is incremental.
See also
Syntactic terms
Notes
- ^ Fortson IV, Benjamin W. (2004). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction.
Blackwell, 186. ISBN 1-4051-0315-9 (hb); 1-4051-0316-7 (pb). “[The Aṣṭādhyāyī] is a highly precise and thorough
description of the structure of Sanskrit somewhat resembling modern generative grammar…[it] remained the most advanced linguistic
analysis of any kind until the twentieth century.”
- ^ Arnauld, Antoine (1683). La
logique, 5th ed., Paris: G. Desprez, 137. “Nous avons emprunté…ce que nous avons dit…d'un petit Livre…sous le
titre de Grammaire générale.”
- ^ Gold, E. (1967). Language identification in the limit. Information and
Control 10, 447-474.
- ^ Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and representations Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- ^ George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
(1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Part IV.. New York: Basic
Books..
- ^ John Hale (2006). "Uncertainty About the
Rest of the Sentence". Cognitive Science 30: 643-672. DOI:doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_64.
jual.
References
- Brown, Keith; Jim Miller (eds.) (1996). Concise
Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. New York: Elsevier Science. ISBN 0-08-042711-1.
- Freidin, Robert; Howard Lasnik (eds.) (2006).
Syntax, Critical Concepts in Linguistics. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-24672-5.
- Graffi, Giorgio (2001). 200 Years of Syntax. A
Critical Survey, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN
90-272-4587-8.
- {{Ottenhiemer, Harriet. The Anthropology of Language- An Introduction To Liguistic Anthropology, 2006.
External links
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