Syntactic Relations
v Meaning of Syntactic relations:-
Sentence is a series of words and
grammar is connected with analysis of these structure and regular patterns of
sentences. A word is a basic grammatical unit and grammar deals with the
inter-relations of words in a sentence. This is the province of Syntax
“A language
without grammar is like a body without soul.”
Morphology and syntax of sentence may
vary from language to language, but the syntactic classification and ordering
of words in sentences are essential parts of the grammar of every language. For
example, in English a sentence may be ‘the
men eat’, but it can not be ‘men to eat’. This shows the essential basis of
syntax. The words can not be put together in any order. The total meaning of a
sentence depends on word-order as we find in the pair of sentence such as ‘the
tigers killed the hunter’ and ‘the hunter killed the tigers.’
v
Three classes
Syntactic relations are fundamentally
very simple. They fall into three
classes, position relations, relation of co-occurrence and relation of
substitutability.
- The positional relations are overt relations. They deal with the comparison of ordered series of sentences with one another.
- Secondly by relations of co-occurrence means that the words of different sets may permit the occurrence of a word of another set to form a sentence. Thus in English words of class, ‘man’, ‘horse’ may be followed by words of class ‘eat’, ‘live’ etc. the strong horse’ is the only permitted order of these three words.
- The third relation substitutability means the sets of words substitutable for each in the same sentence structure. In English the group ‘the man’ is substitutable for ‘man’ , strong man’ is also substitutable for ‘man’. In ‘the came yesterday’, ‘came’, could be substituted in the place of yesterday’. ‘he came’ is a sentence but not ‘yesterday he’.
Word-classes:-
In a language words could be
classified into word-classes according to their syntactic relations with one
another in sentences. In English, we find classes such as horse-horses, maintains-maintain-maintaining-maintained- and
hot-hottest as well as strictly limited classes such as, I, me we, us, he him, thy, them etc.
Similarly some words have syntactic
relations with one another such as,
‘pretty tree’ and ‘beautiful tree’, ‘big house and sizable house, hotter
climate and more temperate climate. These are the examines of syntactic
grouping of words. Thus on can say in English, ‘this is a tree’, this is a
pretty this, this a beautiful tree, this a prettier tree and this is more
beautiful tree. This shows adjective noun or adverb- adjective +noun
relationship. There can be adverb-adjective groups of words also.
Some words form a group by the use of
preposition. The preposition such as at, with, from, precede nouns to form
groups substitutable for adverb for example, he came with speech, he came
quickly, he will discuss it at supper he will discuss it then, he comes form
London, he comes often etc. these words are usually called prepositions and are
distinguished such by this syntactic function. Sentences ending with
preposition are very common such as Where
have you come from? What are you at? And what you up to?
·
use of
conjunctions.
Still there are other groups of words
by the use of conjunctions. They are
preceded a conjunction, otherwise they could considered as complete independent
sentences, such as ,He will have it if he sees it, he came home because he feel
ill, he came gone quickly as he was tired,
Grammatically speaking, words are classified
under the title part of speech, noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb,
preposition, conjunction , article and interjection.
·
their
different formal behaviour
Further; words are classified by their different formal behaviour. This
means that some words are classified under more than one head. The classes,
noun, verb and adjective are required for words like death, pursue, and
malicious. All these three words belong to one class only. While words like ‘work’
belongs both to the noun and verb classes, as he works well, his word is good,
their works are good. In a dictionary also such words have different entries.
Side by side the words like ‘mature’ belong to the verb and the adjective
classes such as the scheme is maturing, he is a mature artist. Words like;
choice; belong to the adjective and noun classes such as the choicest flowers
and his choice is fine.
The English word ‘round’ belong to five classes,
- noun in ‘one round is enough’,
- verb ‘you round the bend quickly’,
- adjective in ‘a round tower’,
- adverb in he wandered around the garden.
·
membership
Word classes may be open or closed in
membership. In open class the membership
is principally unlimited. It varies from time to time and between one speaker
and another. Most of the loan-words and newly created words belong to open
class. Closed classes contain a fixed and usually small number of member words
which are the same for all the speakers of language or the dialect. In English,
noun, adjectives, adverbs and verbs are open classes; pronoun, preposition and conjunctions
are closed classes.
v Immediate
Constituents:-
Meaning:-
Sentence are not merely strings of
word in an acceptable order and ‘making sense’ they are arranged in successive
components which are made of groups of words and of single words, these groups
and sing words are called constituents. When they are considered as separate
parts of sentence, they are called ‘immediate
constituents’.
IC Analysis –
Bloomfield
Immediate Constituent Analysis is a
strong method of analyzing a sentence linguistically. It finds out ultimate
constituents of a sentence and their relationship with one another. The
constituents are nothing but he morphemes or group of morphemes which form and
resentences. This method is now as IC
Analysis – Bloomfield introduced this method 1939. For example, he look u p
the sentence ‘poor john ran away; and splits it up to into two immediate
constituent, ‘poor john’ and ‘ran away’. These could be further divided into
poor, John, ran, and away. So a sentence is not a sequence or a string of
elements. This is made quite clear in the from of the following diagrams.
Thus the IC Analysis separates the
sub-parts of a sentence. The above sentence is made upon of four morphs which
may be defined as the minimum syntactic units.
These morphemes are the ultimate of
sentence. The words ‘ultimate constituents’ imply that these elements could not
be further analyzed. If we further analyze them, we will enter the realm of
phonology. A jumble of a morphemes might not have produced a sentence, such as
, ‘away john poor ran’, ‘each human language has its permissible ways of
organizing morphemes in sentences. Each langue has its ‘linear’ structure that
way the words ‘poor joy ran away’ are tied together. That way, morphemes,
words, phrases, and classes are all constituent of sentences.
The best method to show this to use
principle of the family tree in which tree diagram and branching have become
technical term in IC analysis. For the sentence “A white girl followed the
black man”. The tree diagram would be
Transformation-generative
linguistics:-
Linguistics
is very old. But the period between 1930-1950 is an important period which is
known as Bloomfieldian period, however, in the recent times, we find further
development in this field. Some linguists have developed now ways of studying
language. Now development is kind of reaction to Bloomfield . The four most prominent post
Bloomfieldian theories are transformational linguistics.
Noan Chomsky plays an important part
in the development of the transformational-generative linguistics. His books “syntactic structures” (1957) and “aspects of the theory of syntax” (1957)
reveal this theory. TGL has
attracted the attention of many linguists all over the u.s. , the u.k. and other European countries.
T.G. linguist holds that a linguistic
description of a natural language is an attempt to reveal the nature of fluent
speaker’s mastery over that language. According to Bloomfield , man is born with a capacity to
learn any language. Language is a mechanical process.
Transformation means “transforming one sentence into another, a
deep structure into a surface structure’. For example an active sentence is ‘kernel’, while a passive sentence
is a transformed sentences. There are plenty other transformations. According
to R.H. Robins, Many sentences can be generated form a basis sentence. That way
transformation starts from ‘kernel’. But in his ‘aspects of the theory of
syntax’, Chomsky does not give important to ‘kernel’.
For example ,
- ‘have john see Mary?’ is a transform
of ‘john has seem Mary’,
- ‘a snake was killed by Mohan’ is the
transform of the sentence in the
active voice.
“Mohan
killed a snake”. Similarly “the man
who was standing there ran away” is the transformation of two sentences,
“the man ran away” and “the man was standing there.” The second characteristic
of T.G.L. is that it is ‘generative’. It means that a grammar msut generate all
and only the grammatical sentences of a language. This also means that all
possible sentences should be framed according to the rules and regulations of
the grammar of he language. Thus grammar should generate all acceptable
sentences of a language, and not the ungrammatical or unacceptable ones.
That way generative linguistic is
clear, methodical and accurate and it indicates what are the possible sentences
of he language. It leaves nothing to change, nothing to the reader’
intelligence, nothing to this imagination. The generation of the sentences of a
language should be a pure mechanical procedure. Even a person who does not know
the language can generate sentence by following the rules. Let us have the
following tree diagram to illustrate the syntactic function of the sentence, “The linguist will analyze sentence.”
v Sentence:-
This sentence is represented by the
symbol’s it is composed of a noun phrase
‘the linguist’ and the noun phrases is composed of an article ‘an’ and a noun ‘a’. the verb phase, ‘will analyse a sentence is composed of
an auxiliary and the main verb. The noun phrase sentence is composed of an
article and a noun. This tree diagram
is the picture of a phrase structure are optional while other transformation
are obligatory. For example in singular or plural transformation there is an
agreement between a noon and its verb in ‘the door was opened by john’ the
singular noun phrase is followed by singular verb. Reclusiveness or recursion
is an important characteristic of T.G.
it means that certain grammatical constructions can be extended by repeated use
of he same rule. For example ‘jack and Jill’ and frank went to the dance’ this
may be. Expressed in a phrase structure rule NP+NP+NP and NP. In the same way,
one sentence can subordinate within the structure of another way sentence. For
example, ‘I saw the man”, The man took the cash’. This phrase structure can be
expressed in the form of the following tree diagram of T.G. linguistics. Thus
the T. G. linguists have cleared the transformation relations among different
phrase structures. The Bloomfieldian linguist lay stress on the surface
diversity of language. While he T.G.
linguist lay stress on the underlying universality of language as a human faculty. Thus Chomsky
rightly believes that it is necessary to understand the human mind and human
nature in order to understand a language.
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