The wordsyntax comes from theancient Greek wordσύνταξις, meaning an orderly or systematic arrangement, which consists ofσύν- (syn-, "together" or "alike"), andτάξις (táxis, "arrangement"). InHellenistic Greek, this also specifically developed a use referring to the grammatical order of words, with a slightly altered spelling:συντάσσειν. The English term, which first appeared in 1548, is partly borrowed from Latin (syntaxis) and Greek, though the Latin term developed from Greek.[4]
The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations).
One basic description of a language's syntax is the sequence in which thesubject (S),verb (V), andobject (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequenceSVO or the sequenceSOV. The other possible sequences areVSO,VOS,OVS, andOSV, the last three of which are rare. In most generative theories of syntax, the surface differences arise from a more complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations. However, word order can also reflect the semantics or function of the ordered elements.[5]
Another description of a language considers the set of possible grammatical relations in a language or in general and how they behave in relation to one another in themorphosyntactic alignment of the language. The description of grammatical relations can also reflect transitivity,passivization, and head-dependent-marking or other agreement. Languages have different criteria for grammatical relations. For example, subjecthood criteria may have implications for how the subject is referred to from a relative clause or coreferential with an element in an infinite clause.[6]
Constituency is the feature of being aconstituent and how words can work together to form a constituent (orphrase). Constituents are often moved as units, and the constituent can be the domain of agreement. Some languages allow discontinuous phrases in which words belonging to the same constituent are not immediately adjacent but are broken up by other constituents. Constituents may berecursive, as they may consist of other constituents, potentially of the same type.
TheAṣṭādhyāyī ofPāṇini, fromc. 4th century BC inAncient India, is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory since works ongrammar had been written long before modern syntax came about.[7] In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work ofDionysius Thrax.
For centuries, a framework known asgrammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 byAntoine Arnauld andClaude Lancelot in abook of the same title, dominated work in syntax:[8] as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and so there is a single most natural way to express a thought.[9]
However, in the 19th century, with the development ofhistorical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought and sologic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.[citation needed]
ThePort-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. (Indeed, large parts ofPort-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from theGrammaire générale.[10]) Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "subject – copula – predicate". Initially, that view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such asFranz Bopp.
The central role of syntax withintheoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. (For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Giorgio Graffi (2001).[11])
There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works ofDerek Bickerton,[12] sees syntax as a branch of biology, since it conceives of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the humanmind. Other linguists (e.g.,Gerald Gazdar) take a morePlatonistic view since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstractformal system.[13] Yet others (e.g.,Joseph Greenberg) consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages.
Syntacticians have attempted to explain the causes of word-order variation within individual languages and cross-linguistically. Much of such work has been done within the framework of generative grammar, which holds that syntax depends on agenetic endowment common to the human species. In that framework and in others,linguistic typology anduniversals have been primary explicanda.[14]
Alternative explanations, such as those byfunctional linguists, have been sought inlanguage processing. It is suggested that the brain finds it easier toparsesyntactic patterns that are either right- or left-branching but not mixed. The most-widely held approach is the performance–grammar correspondence hypothesis byJohn A. Hawkins, who suggests that language is a non-innateadaptation to innatecognitive mechanisms. Cross-linguistic tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Some languages, however, exhibit regular inefficient patterning such as the VO languagesChinese, with theadpositional phrase before the verb, andFinnish, which has postpositions, but there are few other profoundly exceptional languages.[15] More recently, it is suggested that the left- versus right-branching patterns are cross-linguistically related only to the place of role-marking connectives (adpositions andsubordinators), which links the phenomena with the semantic mapping of sentences.[16]
Dependency grammar is an approach to sentence structure in which syntactic units are arranged according to the dependency relation, as opposed to the constituency relation ofphrase structure grammars. Dependencies are directed links between words. The (finite) verb is seen as the root of all clause structure and all the other words in the clause are either directly or indirectly dependent on this root (i.e. the verb). Some prominent dependency-based theories of syntax are the following:
Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954) is widely seen as the father of modern dependency-based theories of syntax and grammar. He argued strongly against the binary division of the clause intosubject andpredicate that is associated with the grammars of his day (S → NP VP) and remains at the core of most phrase structure grammars. In place of that division, he positioned the verb as the root of all clause structure.[17]
Categorial grammar is an approach in which constituents combine asfunction andargument, according to combinatory possibilities specified in theirsyntactic categories. For example, other approaches might posit a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), but CG would posit a syntactic categoryNP and anotherNP\S, read as "a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for an NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)." Thus, the syntactic category for anintransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as afunction word requiring an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. The complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. The category oftransitive verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. That is notated as (NP/(NP\S)), which means, "A category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object) and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence."
Generative syntax is the study of syntax within the overarching framework ofgenerative grammar. Generative theories of syntax typically propose analyses of grammatical patterns using formal tools such asphrase structure grammars augmented with additional operations such assyntactic movement. Their goal in analyzing a particular language is to specify rules which generate all and only the expressions which arewell-formed in that language. In doing so, they seek to identify innate domain-specific principles of linguistic cognition, in line with the wider goals of the generative enterprise. Generative syntax is among the approaches that adopt the principle of theautonomy of syntax by assuming that meaning and communicative intent is determined by the syntax, rather than the other way around.
Generative syntax was proposed in the late 1950s byNoam Chomsky, building on earlier work byZellig Harris,Louis Hjelmslev, and others. Since then, numerous theories have been proposed under its umbrella:
Transformational grammar (TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by Chomsky inSyntactic Structures in 1957)[18]
The Cognitive Linguistics framework stems fromgenerative grammar but adheres toevolutionary, rather thanChomskyan, linguistics. Cognitive models often recognise the generative assumption that the object belongs to the verb phrase. Cognitive frameworks include the following:
^Fortson, Benjamin W. (2004).Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. Blackwell. p. 186.ISBN978-1-4051-8896-8.[TheAṣṭādhyāyī] is a highly precise and thorough description of the structure of Sanskrit somewhat resembling modern generative grammar...[it] remained the most advanced linguistic analysis of any kind until the twentieth century.
^Arnauld, Antoine; Lancelot, Claude; Rollin, Bernard E.; Danto, Arthur Coleman; Kretzmann, Norman; Arnauld, Antoine (1975).The Port-Royal grammar: General and rational grammar. The Hague: De Gruyter. p. 197.ISBN9789027930040.
^Arnault, Antoine; Lancelot, Claude (1660).Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port-Royal.
^Arnauld, Antoine (1683).La logique (5th ed.). Paris: G. Desprez. p. 137.Nous avons emprunté...ce que nous avons dit...d'un petit Livre...sous le titre de Grammaire générale.
^SeeBickerton, Derek (1990).Language & Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.ISBN0-226-04610-9. and, for more recent advances,Bickerton, Derek; Szathmáry, Eörs, eds. (2009).Biological Foundations and Origin of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts:MIT Press.ISBN978-0-262-01356-7.
^Concerning Tesnière's rejection of the binary division of the clause into subject and predicate and in favor of the verb as the root of all structure, see Tesnière (1969:103–105).
^Chomsky, Noam (1957).Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. p. 15.
^Chomsky, Noam (1993).Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures (7th ed.). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.ISBN3-11-014131-0.
^Chomsky, Noam (1995).The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Freidin, Robert; Lasnik, Howard, eds. (2006).Syntax. Critical Concepts in Linguistics. New York: Routledge.ISBN0-415-24672-5.
Graffi, Giorgio (2001).200 Years of Syntax: A Critical Survey. Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98. Amsterdam: Benjamins.ISBN90-272-4587-8.
Talasiewicz, Mieszko (2009).Philosophy of Syntax – Foundational Topics. Dordrecht: Springer.ISBN978-90-481-3287-4. An interdisciplinary essay on the interplay between logic and linguistics on syntactic theories.
Tesnière, Lucien (1969).Eléments de syntaxe structurale (in French) (2nd ed.). Paris: Klincksieck.ISBN2-252-01861-5.
Everaert, Martin;Van Riemsdijk, Henk; Goedemans, Rob; Hollebrandse, Bart, eds. (2006).The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell.ISBN978-1-4051-1485-1. 5 Volumes; 77 case studies of syntactic phenomena.
Isac, Daniela; Reiss, Charles (2013).I-Language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive Science (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-966017-9.
Moravcsik, Edith A. (2006).An Introduction to Syntax: Fundamentals of Syntactic Analysis. London: Continuum.ISBN978-0-8264-8946-3. Attempts to be a theory-neutral introduction. The companionMoravcsik, Edith A. (2006).An Introduction to Syntactic Theory. London: Continuum.ISBN0-8264-8943-5. surveys the major theories. Jointly reviewed inHewson, John (2009). "An Introduction to Syntax: Fundamentals of Syntactic Analysis, And: An Introduction to Syntactic Theory (Review)".The Canadian Journal of Linguistics.54 (1):172–175.doi:10.1353/cjl.0.0036.S2CID144032671.
Roark, Brian;Sproat, Richard William (2007).Computational Approaches to Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.ISBN978-0-19-927477-2. part II: Computational approaches to syntax.
