If people encounter the term ‘syntax’, they usually think of ‘grammar’, and for many this term conjures up bad associations of schoolteachers' pronouncements about how one should and should not talk, of seemingly endless conjugations of verbs or declensions of nouns that must be mastered by rote, or of dreary repetitions of insipid phrases in a foreign-language class. This book is about none of these things. It is, rather, about the marvelous diversity of ways of expressing itself that the human mind has created during the evolution of human language. How does an Aborigine from central Australia, a Basque from Spain or an inhabitant of the island of Madagascar put a sentence together? Is it at all similar to the way an English speaker does it? Or a Spanish speaker? Or a Russian speaker? Or a Sioux speaker? Chinese and Japanese speakers use the same characters to write their respective languages; how similar is Chinese syntax to Japanese syntax? How does a scientist go about analysing the structure of all of these different languages?

These are just some of the questions that will be answered in this book. An Introduction to Syntax is first and foremost an exploration of the variety of human languages, with examples drawn from every part of the globe.

Introduction

In the previous two chapters, two different ways of representing syntactic structure were presented, dependency relations and constituent structure (phrase structure). In doing syntactic analysis, it is not enough to simply represent the syntactic structure of sentences. The goal of the syntactic analysis of a language (or set of sentences from a language) is to formulate a grammar which will specify the sentences in the data. By specifying the sentences by means of a set of rules, the analyst makes explicit the structure of the sentences and expresses generalizations about them. Two different types of rules will be presented: phrase-structure rules as part of a grammar based on constituent (phrase) structure, and relational-dependency rules as part of a grammar based on dependency relations, which includes grammatical relations.

The rules of the grammar specify the way the form classes in the language may combine, and a useful distinction may be drawn between lexical and phrasal form classes. Lexical form classes are the lexical categories discussed in chapter 1, e.g., noun, verb, adjective, adposition. Phrasal form classes are constituents like noun phrase, prepositional phrase and verb phrase, which are specified by the rules of the grammar. The elements in the lexical form classes are stored in the lexicon, which may be thought of as the storehouse of the words and morphemes in the language.

Introduction

In section 1.1 two distinct facets of syntactic structure, namely relational structure and constituent structure, were distinguished, and in this chapter and the next the two main approaches to describing syntactic structure, namely dependency grammar and constituent-structure grammar, will be presented. Dependency grammar concentrates on the relational aspect of syntax, while constituent-structure grammar focuses on the constituent-structure aspect. The grammatical relations discussed in the previous chapter express a kind of dependency holding between the verb (or other predicating element) and the NPs and/or PPs in the clause. Other types of dependencies exist as well, for example, the dependence of a modifier on the element it modifies, and in this chapter these other types of dependency relations will be examined.

At the end of the discussion of lexical categories in section 1.2, it was mentioned that in modern linguistics lexical categories are defined not in terms of their meaning but in terms of their morphosyntactic properties. With respect to determining the form class of an item, the important questions to ask are ‘what elements can it cooccur with?’ and ‘what morphosyntactic environment(s) can it occur in?’ The relation that a morphosyntactic element has to the elements it cooccurs with is termed a syntagmatic relation, and it is one of the two fundamental relations that underlie language as a structural system.