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5.2 Word Classes and Word Order ①The boy kicked the ball angrily.
② Boy the ball kicked angrily. ③ The girl caught the ball angrily. ④ The flower smiles happily.
Chapter 5 Grammar: Clause
5.1 Introduction Clause (小句/子句)
—a group of words which form a grammatical unit and which contain a subject and a finite verb. A clause forms a sentence or part of a sentence and often functions as a noun, adjective or adverb.
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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 language, the sentence will be ungrammatical or nonsensical.
(coordinate sentence/compound sentence)
3) Because I was late, they went without me.
subordinator subordinate clause (从属句) main clause(独立句,主句)
complex sentence
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X’ Theory (X-bar Theory)
A girl with brown hair X ’’ P (Specifier) X’ X’ X (complement)
X ’’ P (Phrase level) X’
Specifier
( the)
X (head) complement
Which are correct and which are not, and why? Determiner + noun + verb + determiner+ noun + adv The dog ate the bone noisily. The boy kicked the ball angrily.
(The tall boy has kicked the ball with his right foot angrily. )
Relation of substitutability
refers to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in the same sentence structures.
a
girl
with brown hair 7
Specifiers
---- Semantically, specifiers make more precise the meaning of the head; syntactically, they typically mark a phrase boundary. Specifiers can be determiners as in NP, qualifiers as in VP and degree words as in AP.
Syntactic category(句法范畴）:
a category of words having the same grammatical properties Phrase: expansion of words.
E.g. the new book; run fast “ head words”
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Syntax (句法)
—a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.
( More: ….is the study of the structure of phrases, clauses and especially sentences. It is considered as a subset in the study of grammar, which includes all areas of language aspects including phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Syntax studies how phrases and clauses are constructed. )
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Examples:
1) I hurried home.
( a sentence, also a clause, a simple sentence)
2) John likes linguistics, but Mary is interested in history.
coordinating conjunction
Clause (go to the book)
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The XP rule
XP
Specifier
X
ComplLeabharlann mentHead(Phrase elements)
Note: The phrase structure rules can be summed up as XP rule shown in the diagram, in which X stands for N, V, A or P, which refer to nouns, verbs, adjectives and prepositions.