• Exocentric construction: – the basic sentence, – the prepositional phrase, – the predicate (verb + object) construction – the connective (be + complement) construction.
• He kicked the ball. (Neither constituent stands for the verb-object sequence.) • John seemed angry. (After division, the connective construction no longer exists.)
Tree diagram
S
NP Det N V VP NP
Det N
The boy ate the apple
Bracketing
• ((The) ( boy)) ( (ate) ((the) (apple))). • [S [NP [Det The] [N girl] ] [VP [V ate] [NP [Det the] [N apple]]]]
4.2.4 Coordination and Subordination
• Endocentric constructions fall into two main types, depending on the relation between constituents.
Chapter 4 From Word to Text
Outline
4.1 Syntactic Relations 4.2 Grammatical Construction and Its Constituents 4.3 Syntactic Function 4.4 Category 4.5 Phrase, Clause and Sentence 4.6 Recursiveness 4.7 Beyond the Sentence
– The
strong man tallest boy pretty girl
smiles.
yesterday. last week. the day before.
– He went there
• This is also called Associative Relations by Saussure, and Paradigmatic Relations by Hjemslev.
4.2.3 Endocentric and Exocentric Constructions
• Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable centre or head. – E.g. noun phrases, verb phrases & adjective phrases
• The boy smiled. (Neither constituent can substitute for the sentence structure as a whole.)
• He hid behind the door. (Neither constituent can function as an adverbial.)
The girl ate the apple
Syntactic Categories
Word-level
N=noun A=adjective V=verb P=preposition Det=determiner Adv=adverb Conj=conjunction
Phrasal
NP=noun phrase AP=adjective phrase VP=verb phrase PP=preposition phrase S=sentence or clause
– the girl (NP)
– ate the apple (VP)
– the girl ate the apple (S)
• Immediate Constituent Analysis
( IC Analysis)
The analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents– word groups (or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached.
• Positional relation, or WORD ORDER, refers to the sequential arrangement of words in a language. If the words in a sentence fail to occur in a fixed order required by the convention of a language?
– To make it more understandable, they are called Vertical Relations or Choice Relations.
4.1.3 Relation of Co-occurrence
• It means that words of different sets of clauses may permit, or require, the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence.
– an apple (determiner +noun→ NP)
– ate an apple (verb + NP → VP)
– Mary ate an apple (noun + VP → S)
4.2.2 Immediate Constituents
• Constituent is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a cboy kicked the ball.
– *Boy the ball kicked the – *The ball kicked the boy
• The teacher saw the students. • The students saw the teacher.
• Positional relations are a manifestation of one aspect of Syntagmatic Relations observed by F. de Saussure. – They are also called Horizontal Relations or simply Chain Relations.
4.1.1 Positional Relation
• For language to fulfill its communicative function, it must have a way to mark the grammatical roles of the various phrases that can occur in a clause. • The boy kicked the ball. NP1 NP2 Subject Object
• Syntax is the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures.
– The ______ smiles. man boy girl
• It also refers to groups of more than one word which may be jointly substitutable grammatically for a single word of a particular set.
Three basic ways to • Word order
Genetic relatedness, i.e. some languages share a classify languages: common ancestor language, e.g. English and German
• Relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations, partly to paradigmatic relations.
4.2 Grammatical Construction and Its Constituents
4.2.1 Grammatical Construction • Grammatical construction (or construct) refers to any syntactic construct which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contribution to the meaning or use the construct contains.