Chapter 4Chapter 3语言学四.doc

Chapter 4 Syntax 4.1 The traditional approach 4.1.1 Number, gender and case 4.1.2 Tense and aspect [For these two sections, please consult materials on traditional English grammar. – icywarmtea] 4.1.3 Concord and government Concord (a.k.a. agreement) may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. E.g. in English the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man, these men. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense, e.g. He speaks English; They speak English. Government is another type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic construction. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category. E.g. in English, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book; She gave a book to him. In other words, the verb, or the preposition, governs the form of the pronoun after it. The former is the governor, and the latter is the governed. 4.2 The structural approach 4.2.1 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations Syntagmatic (a.k.a. horizontal / chain) relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present, such as the relation between weather and the others in the following sentence: If the weather is nice, we’ll go out. Paradigmatic (a.k.a. vertical / choice) relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent. 4.2.2 Immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis) 1. How to do it Immediate constituents are constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction, which may be a sentence or a word group or a word. Immediate const