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This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia\'s quality standards. Please improve this article if you can. (May 2007) |
For other uses, see Syntax (disambiguation).
In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, “together”, and τάξις táxis, “arrangement”) are the rules of a language that show how the words of that language are to be arranged to make a sentence of that language. The term syntax can also be used to refer to these rules themselves, as in "the syntax of Gaelic". Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules, and, for many practitioners, to find general rules that apply to all languages. Since the field of syntax attempts to explain grammatical judgments, and not provide them, it is unconcerned with linguistic prescription.
Though all theories of syntax use humans as their object of study, there are some significant differences in outlook. Many linguists (e.g. Noam Chomsky) see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Others (e.g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, regarding syntax as the study of an abstract formal system. [1]; others also (e.g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar as a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations among languages.
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Works on grammar were of course being written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a pre-modern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.Fortson IV, Benjamin W. (2004). Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction. Blackwell, 186. ISBN 1-4051-0315-9 (hb); 1-4051-0316-7 (pb). “[The Aṣṭādhyāyī] 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.” In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as ‘traditional grammar’ began with the work of Dionysius Thrax.
For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and hence there is a single most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question fundamental assumptions about the relation between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and logic could no longer be relied upon as a base for studying the structure of language.
The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax on that of logic (indeed, large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire généraleArnauld, Antoine (1683). La logique, 5th ed., Paris: G. Desprez, 137. “Nous avons emprunté…ce que nous avons dit…d\'un petit Livre…sous le titre de Grammaire générale.” ). Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analysed into the form "Subject-Copula-Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists (e.g., Bopp).
The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the last 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 Graffi 2001.
Generative grammar hypothesizes that language is a mental structure of the human mind. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner-language (or i-language) which could be used to describe all human speech, and predict the grammaticality of any given speech utterance (that is, whether speech would sound correct to native speakers of the language). This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based in constituent structure. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of the sentence rather than the function.
Among the many Chomskyan generative theories of linguistics are:
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
HPSG and LFG also fall in the category of unification grammars.
Categorial grammar is an approach that focuses on the combinatoric properties of categories. For example, an intransitive verb has the property that it requires a noun phrase (NP) to complete it and the result is a sentence (S) thus the category of such a verb is NP\S (in one notation).
Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the relation between a word (a head) and its dependents rather than being based in constituent structure.
Some dependency-based theories of Syntax
Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based in probability theory are known as stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a Neural network or Connectionism. Some theories based in this are:
Functionalist theories, although concerned about form, are driven by explanation based in the function of a sentence (i.e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories include:
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