Билет 1 I. Syntax as part of grammar. The main units of syntax.

Syntax as part of grammar analyses the rules of combining words into phrases, sentences and supra-sentential constructions or texts.

The rules of combinability of linguistic units are connected with the most general and abstract parts of content of the elements of language. These parts of content together with the formal means of their expression are treated as “grammatical categories”. In syntax, they are, for instance, the categories of communicative purpose or emphasis, which are actualized by means of word-order. Thus, word-order (direct or indirect), viewed as a grammatical form, expresses the difference between the central idea of the sentence and the marginal idea, between emotive and unemotive modes of speech, e.g.:

In the center of the room stood the old man.

The word arrangement in this sentence expresses a narrative description with the central informative element placed in the strongest position, i.e. at the end.

Thus, grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression (i.e. a unity of form and meaning). Accordingly, the purpose of Modern Grammar, and Syntax in particular, is to disclose and formulate the rules of the correspondence between the plane of content and the plane of expression in the process of utterance-formation.

The main units of syntax are phrases and sentences.

The phrase is a combination of two or more notional words which is a grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of some word. The main difference between the phrase and the sentence is in their linguistic function. The phrase is a nominative unit, the sentence is a predicative one.

Nomination is naming things and their relations. A nominative unit simply names something known to everybody or a majority of native language speakers, recalling it from their memory, e.g.: a book, a departure. A phrase represents an object of nomination as a complicated phenomenon, be it a thing, an action, a quality or a whole situation, e.g.: an interesting book, to start with a jerk, absolutely fantastic, his unexpected departure.

The sentence is the immediate unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a communicative purpose. The sentence, naming a certain situation, expresses predication, i.e. shows the relation of the denoted event to reality through the grammatical categories of tense, person and mood. The category of tense is used to convey something new and define its place in reality as preceding, or following the act of communication. The category of person shows,

whether the situation involves the communicators or not. Through the category of mood the event is shown as real or unreal, desirable or obligatory.

Thus, the sentence presents a unity in its nominative and predicative aspects, denoting a certain event in its reference to reality. The distinguishing features of the sentence are predication, modality and communicative meaningfulness.

It is stated that the center of predication in a sentence of verbal type is a finite verb, which expresses essential predicative meanings by its categorial forms (categories of tense and mood). Some linguists though (V.V Vinogradov, M.Y.Bloch) insist that predication is effected not only by the forms of the finite verb, but also by all the other forms and elements of the sentence, which help establish the connection between the named objects and reality. They are such means as intonation, word order, different functional words.

Due to their nominative meaning, both the sentence and the phrase enter the system of language by their syntactic patterns. The traditional linguistics considers four main types of syntactic patterns: predicative (subject + predicate), objective (verb +object), attributive (attribute + noun), adverbial (verb/adverb/adjective + adverbial modifier).

 

Билет 2 II. Traditional and cognitive understanding of syntax.

The traditional, or systemic approach in Grammar, centers around the description of structural properties of linguistic units and their meanings, as they are represented in the system of language without considering the process of utterance-formation, i.e. it doesn’t envisage the general (cognitive and linguistic) mechanisms which enable us to shape the conceptual content into a sentence and what’s more important to structure the exact sentence we want, corresponding to our pragmatic intention (for example, what’s the difference between the following pairs of sentences, if any at all: Bill sent a walrus to Joyce. Bill sent Joyce a walrus; Buzzing, the car went down the road. The car buzzed down the road.

To find the answers seems possible within a cognitive approach, the approach which was started in the second half of the 20^th century and since then has been greatly promoted by foreign linguists.

Cognitive linguistics appeared within a framework of approaches to the analysis of language, which are the formal, the psychological, and the conceptual. The formal approach addresses the linguistic patterns, abstracted away from any associated meaning. Thus, this approach includes the study of morphological, syntactic, lexical structure. Traditional generative grammar has centered itself within this approach. The psychological approach looks at language from the perspective of general cognitive systems, within this approach language is examined from the perspective of perception, memory, attention, reasoning. The main target of the conceptual approach is to consider the global system of schematic structures with which language organizes conceptual content that it expresses. Cognitive approach is concerned with the patterns in which and the processes by which conceptual content is organized in language, or, in other words, how language structures conceptual content. Cognitive linguistics studies how language structures such basic conceptual categories as those of space and time, scenes and events, entities and properties, motion and location, force and causation. It considers the semantic structure of morphological and lexical forms as well as that of syntactic patterns. Cognitive linguistics considers language a cognitive system, which along with other cognitive systems, such as perception, attention, reasoning, affect, memory, motor control comprises human cognition. In this respect language appears to have some structural properties common to other cognitive systems. The investigation of linguistic means in cognitive aspect, that is examining of meaning-form mappings is based on the recent findings of psychology: such as the prototypical principle of category structure, the principle of figure-ground segregation, “windowing” of attention and some others.