Literature

1. Grammar of the modern Russian literary language / rep. ed. N.Yu. Shvedova. – M., 1970. – P. 541-547.

2. Russian grammar / ch. ed. N.Yu. Shvedova. – T. 2: Syntax. – M., 1980.– P. 92-123, 136-180.

3. Modern Russian language / V.A. Beloshapkova, E.A. Bryzgunova, E.A. Zemskaya and others; edited by V.A. Beloshapkova. – 3rd ed., – M., 2003. – P. 716-763.

At the end of the 60s. XX century In Russian syntactic science, a type of description of the formal organization of a sentence appeared, based on the concept of a structural diagram.

Block diagram is an abstract sample consisting of minimum components necessary to create an offer.

There are two understandings of the minimum supply:

1. Formal and grammatical minimum(predicative center; T.P. Lomtev, N.D. Arutyunova, P.A. Lekant, etc.) .

This understanding of the minimum was put forward by N.Yu. Shvedova and presented in “Russian Grammar” 1980 and “Grammar of the Modern Russian Literary Language” 1970. The scheme does not include conventional distributors:

The boy threw the ball. N 1 – Vf

2. Semantic (nominative) minimum:

The boy threw the ball. N 1 – V f – N 4obj

In this case, some conventional distributors, necessary for the semantic sufficiency of the syntactic structure: a distributor of a transitive verb, expressed by a noun in the form of V.p.; substantive-subject expander ( Smells like bird cherry. Praed N 5); case or prepositional case form with spatial meaning or adverb:

The ball is under the table (there). N 1 V f N 5 loc / Adv loc

Depending on how the predicative minimum is organized (by one or two word forms), the structural schemes differ two-component And one-component:

It is impossible to sit indoors in the spring.Praed Inf

I don't care about you anymore.No N 2

To prove means to convince.Inf cop Inf

The hungry cannot be understood by the well-fed.Inf

What joy!N 2

A structural diagram in the understanding of “Russian Grammar” of 1980 is a syntactic pattern that has not only a formal organization, but also a linguistic meaning.

This meaning, common to all structural schemes, is predicativity. Objective-modal meanings that form predicativeness are expressed using syntactic tenses and moods.

N.Yu. Shvedova clarifies the list syntactic moods, which includes: syntactic indicative (present, past and future tense), syntactic irreal moods (subjunctive, conditional, desirable, imperative, obligatory). All these particular modal-temporal meanings are expressed by certain modifications of the formal organization of the sentence (that is sentence forms). The entire system of sentence forms is called its paradigm.

The complete sentence paradigm is eight-membered, the original form is the present tense form of the syntactic indicative.

The concept of a proposal. Structural and functional syntax. Basic concepts of generative grammar.

Offer

The moment of message, communication arises precisely in syntax. That is why, for syntax, the communicative component, and not the formal structure, is often the relevant feature.

Based on this principle, Reformatsky defines a sentence:

A sentence is a statement containing a predicative syntagm. A small retrospective - a syntagma in this context - is a minimal syntactic unit. Reformatsky calls it the “grain of communication.”

Normally in speech, a sentence is pronounced with closed intonation, but this is not a mandatory feature.

Further Reformatsky writes about the members of the sentence (main and secondary) and about their types (simple or compound) - I think that there is no point in going on about this, since there are no tricks here, we seem to have to remember this.

Sentences are divided into types according to the presence of syntagmas:

Only predicative syntagma - a simple unextended sentence

Predicative and relative - simple common sentence

Sentences with the presence of isolated phrases are considered an intermediate type between simple and complex sentences (since phrases are carriers of potential predicativity)

In general, you can tell everything about a sentence that you know about sentences from syntax.

Structural syntax

Lucien Tenier - Basics of Structural Syntax

Tenier's idea

Linear syntax - structured syntax

The diagram conveys the hierarchical structure of the sentence, and the syntax is the hierarchy

Tenier introduces a sentence scheme - stemma - which depicts the structure

According to T, the main thing is verb

Moreover, the form of the verb dictates the form of the entire sentence

Tenier divided verbs into the following:

The dummy octant \it rains may appear in European languages

2) One-octant verb (trad lingu - intransitive verb)\alfred falls, gets sick

And a little dry theory:

1. The subject of structural syntax is the study of sentences.<…>

2. A sentence is an organized whole, the elements of which are words.

3. Each word included in a sentence loses its isolation, which is always inherent in it in the dictionary. You can notice that each word of the sentence enters into certain relationships with neighboring words. communications<…>, the totality of which constitutes the backbone, or structure, of a sentence.<…>

5.<…>A sentence like Alfred parle "Alfred says" does not consist of two elements: 1) Alfred and 2) parle, and from three: 1) Alfred, 2) parle and 3) the connection that unites them and without which there would be no proposal. To say that a sentence like Alfred parle contains only two elements is to analyze it from a purely superficial, morphological point of view and to ignore the most essential thing - the syntactic connection.<…>

7. Syntactic connection necessary to express thoughts. Without it we could not convey any coherent content. Our speech would be a simple sequence of isolated images and ideas, unrelated to each other.

8. It is the syntactic connection that makes the sentence living organism, and it is in it that his life force.

9. To construct a sentence means to breathe life into an amorphous mass of words, having installed the totality between them syntactic connections.

10. And vice versa, to understand a sentence means understand the totality of connections, which combine the words included in it.

11. The concept of syntactic connection is, therefore, basis all structural syntax.<…>

12. Strictly speaking, it is precisely what we call connection that is expressed by the word “syntax” itself, meaning in Greek “arrangement”, “establishment of order”.<…>

13. For clarity, we will depict connections between words graphically, using lines that we will call lines of syntactic communication. <…>

Functional syntax

This is communicative syntax. It is based on Humboldt's doctrine that everything has semantics.

The object of studying the functions of syntax is to clarify the role (function) of all syntactic means (units, constructions) in the construction of coherent speech.

This is exactly the syntax that was taught to us - especially for Onipenko groups.

If you adhere to Zolotova’s direction, then the key points are:

"Functional-communicative

1) recognition of the minimum syntactic unit (syntaxeme)

2) construction of a typology of syntactic

connections from the typology of syntaxes

3) recognition of the priority of semantics in the triad - form, meaning, function

4) sign of isosemicity as characterizing

relationship between form and meaning

5) the concept of a sentence model and

typology of sentence models based on the Russian parts of speech system

6) presentation of the Russian syntactic system as a system of syntactic

7) correlation of the paradigmatic capabilities of the sentence model with its

functional-text capabilities

8) text interpretation

Generative grammar

Generative grammar is associated primarily with the name of Chomsky. Appears in the 50s, due to the fact that the formal approach, which does not take into account the semantics of linguistic units, began to become obsolete. We can say that this was a crisis for the descriptivists, because, using the distributive method, they successfully solved a number of problems in the field of phonetics and morphology. But distributional analysis didn’t really work with syntax.

A new, transformational method of analysis was proposed by Noam Chomsky. With his book “Syntactic Structures” (57d), the development of generative grammar begins.

When using the transformation method, the main unit should be considered the sentence. Sentences are divided into initial (elementary) and derivative.

The syntactic system of any language can be represented in the form of elementary sentences, which are called nuclear sentences. They are the most stable and primary (those, for example, appear earlier in a child’s speech). From the simplest nuclear sentences, various derivative sentences can be constructed through transformations.

Chomsky described 24 types of transformations, including

Substitution - replacing one element with another

Permutation - rearrangement of elements

Adjunction - adding elements

Ellipsis - element exclusion

The main problem is to separate grammatically correct sequences from grammatically incorrect ones.

The greatest interest for a linguist, according to Chomsky, should be the process of generating sentences. Under the influence of this approach, Chomsky even abandoned the perception of linguistic levels as static and mutually impenetrable layers - for Chomsky these are successive stages of generation.

In the concept of generative grammar, the main figure is the speaking person, and it is with him that the most important concepts of generative grammar are associated:

Competence is real knowledge of your language;

Usage is the actual use of language in specific situations.

Modern theories
general syntax - school

Definition of the basic concepts of syntactic theory

1. Morphology and syntax.

According to ancient linguistic tradition, grammar is divided into two disciplines: morphology and syntax. The term “morphology” means “the study of the form” of a word. Back in the 19th century. The central section of formal grammar was precisely morphology, because the most obvious was the change in word forms in Indo-European languages: the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs.

The term “syntax” was borrowed from military vocabulary and meant “co-arrangement of parts, construction” (the word tactics– “sequence of actions” – has the same root). The term itself indicates that this section of grammar deals with units that are combinations of words. Thus, the word is the central unit of European grammar (“parts of speech”, “members of a sentence”, etc.). The word distinguishes two main disciplines - morphology and syntax. Everything that is smaller than a word (within a word) is a subject of morphology, everything that is larger than a word (a combination of words) is a subject of syntax. That is, it is the concept of the word that is key to distinguishing between morphology and syntax. But the word is structured differently in different languages ​​of the world, so different languages ​​will differ in morphology and syntax. Synthetic languages ​​(for example, Russian) are languages ​​with rich morphology. Analytical languages ​​(for example, English) are languages ​​with developed syntax. Russian word, for example good, will, in addition to the lexical meaning, contain indications of gender, number and case. And the English word round may be a different part of speech depending on the context (there is no indication of grammatical class within the word itself).

So, syntax is the part of grammar that deals with units that are longer than a word. Traditionally, the units of syntax are the phrase and the sentence. However, not any combination of words is a phrase, but only those words that are connected to each other by a syntactic connection. A sentence can even consist of one word if it performs a communicative function and is a predicative unit, that is, it is updated by indicating tense and mood. This is what makes the word different spring as a nominative unit from a communicative unit - sentences Spring!. The linking verb is omitted from the present tense sentence There is, which, pointing to the present tense and the indicative mood, fits the statement into the context of the speech situation and actualizes it. Some linguists said that a word is a unit of a language system, and a sentence goes beyond the boundaries of the language system into speech, into the area of ​​linguistic creativity.

Word and sentence have different structures. A word is a rigid complex of morphemes: morphemes cannot be swapped (you cannot put an inflection before the root and a prefix after it), you cannot remove and endlessly add new morphemes to the word. A.A. Reformatsky, for example, tried to come up with a word that would consist of a large number of postfixes; he came up with a somewhat artificial word malicious– you cannot add even more postfixes to this word. On the contrary, a sentence is a relatively free complex of units. Words in a sentence can be interchanged (in languages ​​with free word order). For example, in Latin it was customary to place words connected by a syntactic connection far from each other: “ First he was considered among the Romans poet" However, the sentence has a more complex hierarchical structure, in addition, sentences are capable of unlimited complication - they can be extended by adding subordinate clauses, adverbs and participial phrases, etc.

Many linguists of the 20th century, for example L. Tenier, said that the entire modern grammatical theory is structured in such a way that morphology is in the center, and syntax is given a secondary role. However, modern linguistics is trying to rethink the general theory by presenting syntax as the “organizational center of grammar.”

2. Syntax and vocabulary.

So, the word is not only the central unit that allows us to distinguish between two grammatical disciplines: morphology and syntax. The concept of a word combines grammar and vocabulary. As we have already said, in Russian words often contain lexical and grammatical meanings. However, some syntactic theories proposed considering abstract syntactic structures devoid of lexical content, that is, without connection with vocabulary. Linguists said that vocabulary deals with specific meanings, and grammar serves only to classify, categorize words, indicates the relationship of words to each other, that is, it does not operate with meanings. The concept of “pure grammar” was formulated. In this context, L.V.’s phrase is interesting. Shcherby The glok kuzdra shteko has sprouted the bokr and curls the bokrenka, which is devoid of lexical meanings, but is grammatically correct. Shcherba asked students to think about this phrase and answer the question: is it true that we do not understand anything that is conveyed by this phrase? Can we say that there is an indication of the connection of words with each other, of the morphological features of words, but the meaning, meaning is completely absent. The students responded that they understood the situation described: a certain creature performed a single action in the past on a probably adult animal and continues to perform an action in the present on the baby of this animal. The grammar reported this. All that remains is to name the characters and say what exactly kuzdra did with sideways And bokrenkom, that is, turn to vocabulary. Thus, grammar also conveys part of the meaning; it is inextricably linked with vocabulary.

Later, linguists noticed that the lexical content of syntactic structures (that is, the choice of words for a sentence) is very important. Noam Chomsky, for example, said that sincerity can scare a boy, but the reverse is not true: the boy cannot be frightened by sincerity. This allows us to conclude that meaning has a serious, one might say decisive, influence on syntactic structures.

The syntactic structure of a sentence is determined by the grammatical properties of the words included in it. Interest in categorical semantics made it possible to construct a new syntactic theory in the light of the close interaction between syntax and vocabulary.

Description of some syntactic theories

1. Formal syntax.

The simplest and most obvious theory of syntax is a list of all the correct sentences of a language. Even the ancient grammatical tradition proposed listing schemes and sentence patterns as a way of describing syntactic structures. Each sentence can be presented in the form of a diagram - a list of sentence members and their connections. The sentences themselves are classified depending on their form: one-part and two-part sentences, simple and complex, complex and complex, etc. Complex sentences, for example, were grouped according to the nature of conjunctions and allied words without consistent and strict consideration of content. Formal syntax in the Russian linguistic tradition was presented in the works of scientists of the Fortunat school: M.N. Peterson, A.M. Peshkovsky, A.A. Shakhmatova. In school textbooks up to our time, a logical-grammatical classification of sentences is presented, which is usually associated with the name F.I. Buslaeva.

2. Structural syntax.

In the first half of the 19th century. in linguistics, the structural approach to the study of language triumphed. The desire to bring linguistics closer to the exact sciences contributed to the emergence of theories that could objectively describe the complex, multi-level structure of language and explain the interconnection of linguistic units. The triumph of the structural approach was the creation of a special science - phonology, which explained the structure and functioning of the phonetic system of the language. Morphology and vocabulary also used the structural method to a greater or lesser extent. The situation with syntax was more complicated. Firstly, syntactic units were an open list, that is, all possible sentences cannot be counted and described. Secondly, many linguists did not consider syntax within the framework of a structural description of the language system, since syntax already represented linguistic creativity, the use of ready-made language units in speech. Emile Benveniste, for example, excluding the syntactic level from the language system, paid attention to the main property of the sentence - the ability to perform a communicative function, to the actualization of the syntactic structure in the context of the speech situation.

Structuralists fundamentally distinguished between “internal” and “external” linguistics. The first represents the structure of the language system, and the external represents the influence of various external factors on the language. The subject of close study by structuralists was precisely “internal” linguistics. But syntax is very closely connected with the process of thinking and speech formation, with psychology and logic. So, the structuralists did not pay enough attention to syntax, and the very method they used could not provide an adequate syntactic theory.

However, attention should be paid to one interesting attempt to describe syntax within the framework of the structural direction, presented in the work of the French scientist Lucien Tenier. Unlike other structuralists, he spoke about the importance and primacy of syntax in language. The basis of structural syntax is the syntactic connection of elements. To construct a sentence means to breathe life into an amorphous mass of words by establishing a set, a hierarchy of syntactic connections. Tenier was a teacher of foreign languages ​​and wrote teaching aids for his students. He said that along with linear syntax, that is, the order of units in a sentence, there is structural syntax, that is, a hierarchy of units. The structural order is multidimensional, because Each control element can have several subordinates. The center of any sentence is the verb. The verb describes action, that is, it expresses a little drama. With a verb there can be characters (actants) and circumstances - places, time, method, etc., in which the process unfolds (circonstants). Verbs have different numbers of actants. The verb may not have any active persons; it is an actantless (impersonal verb - evening) verb. A verb can only have one actor; it is a one-actant verb (intransitive - Alfred falls). A verb can have two characters; it is a two-actant verb (transitive - Alfred hits Charles). A verb can have three characters; it is a three-actant verb ( Alfred gives Charles a book). The ability to attach actants is called the valence of a verb.

3. Communicative syntax.

The main function of language - communicative - is realized through syntax. This is the stage of the grammatical structure of a language at which coherent speech is formed. Communicative syntax proposes to describe syntactic structures based on their meaning, rather than their formal structure.

Syntax is associated with thinking, the process of communication and the designated surrounding reality. The communicative functions of syntactic structures are the same in the languages ​​of the world, which makes syntax the most universal part of the structure of a language. At the same time, the ways of expressing syntactic relations in each language represent linguistic specificity. Functional syntax allows you to describe the structures that are used in the language to express a request, order, admiration, etc.

Within the framework of the communicative approach to syntactic units, it was formulated theory of actual division of a sentence. Depending on the relevance, importance of a particular content, and significance for communication, the proposal can be divided into two parts. One part - the most important, obligatory for the existence of a sentence - is called rhema. Without it, the sentence loses its meaning. Rema– a component of the communicative structure that constructs a speech act. The other part of the sentence is optional, representing, as it were, the background of the rheme, is topic.

This theory was first formulated in the works of the Czech scientist V. Mathesius, the leader of the Prague linguistic circle. The actual division of a sentence is contrasted with its formal division. Offer Karl is going to Berlin tomorrow formally divided into major and minor members; such division does not imply options. However, from the point of view of the importance and relevance of the message in a given communicative situation, the main member of the sentence (rheme) can become any word, for example, Tomorrow or to Berlin.

It is obvious that in colloquial speech and dialogue, syntactic structures consisting only of rheme - the main part of the sentence - are often used. In this regard, the problem of ellipsis began to be developed, that is, the possibility of removing parts from a sentence that were irrelevant for a given communicative situation began to be discussed. Thus, the theory of actual division made it possible to develop issues of the syntax of colloquial speech, features of the syntactic structures of dialogue, problems of ellipsis, etc.

LITERATURE

1. Peshkovsky A.M. Russian syntax in scientific coverage. M., 2001.

2. Benveniste E. Levels of linguistic analysis // Benveniste E. General linguistics. BGK im. I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay. 1998. pp. 129–140.

3. Tenier L. Basics of structural syntax. M.: Progress, 1988.

4. Mathesius V. About the so-called actual division of a sentence. // Prague Linguistic Circle. M.: Progress, 1967.

O.A. VOLOSHIN,
Ph.D. Phil. sciences,
MSU,
Moscow

Lecture 09/16/15

Constructive syntax (structural)

This section of syntax studies sentences in terms of their general structure. In this regard, first of all, simple and complex sentences are distinguished:

Simple sentences - In these sentences, only one basis is distinguished (predicative line), which in turn consists of the main members of the sentence: subject and predicate. Depending on the implementation of the members of the stem, simple sentences are divided into one-part and two-part. In two-part sentences, both members of the sentence are realized. These proposals, in turn, can be common and non-common. In non-common sentences, only those sentence members are present that are necessary to implement the structure of the given sentence, that is, without these members the sentence would be semantically and syntactically incomplete. For example,the student took the book(the sentence is not common, since the word “book” is a direct object, which must be used with the transitive verb “took”); A good student yesterday took an interesting book from the library (the words “good”, “yesterday”, “in the library”, “interesting” are optional members of the sentence making it common). One-part sentences imply the presence of only one main member. One-part sentences based on

subject are divided into existential (for example, Autumn.), nominative ( For example, "Inspector"), exclamation marks ( For example, FIRE!), index ( For example, Here is the house.). It should be noted that all of the above subtypes are variants of one basic structure

predicate are also divided into impersonal ( For example, It's getting light. It was freezing.), vaguely - personal ( For example, If you're in a hurry, you'll make people laugh.), generalized - personal ( For example, Chickens are counted in the fall.), imperative ( For example, Get out!)

Each of the above subtypes is characterized by a specific form, and thus one-part sentences based on the predicate are differentiated more clearly than those based on the subject.

Compound sentences (CSS). In these sentences there are at least two predicative lines (or stems), which are centers for the formation of simple sentences as part of a complex one, which are called “clauses”. SSPs imply the presence of a coordinating connection between clauses, that is, there is syntactic equality between all clauses (in other words, the main and subordinate clauses do not differ). The writing part can be union or non-union. If there is a conjunction connection, depending on the conjunction involved, several types of this connection can be distinguished: connecting (for example, and, and), adversative (for example, a, but, but), disjunctive conjunctions (for example, or, or, or). Complex structures can be of open and closed types. Open constructions suggest the potential possibility of developing the situation described by this sentence by adding additional clauses (for example, They were sitting by the river, the wayves were rolling at the distance, the seagulls were flying above). Closed constructions exclude the possibility of potential development due to the addition of additional clauses (for example, He made faces, he ran about, but the child didn’t smile).

Complex sentences (CSS). In these sentences, clauses reveal an unequal syntactic connection. In this regard, IPP clauses are divided into two types: main clause and subordinate clause(s). Subordinate clauses in one way or another extend either individual parts of the main clause or the main clause as a whole. Accordingly, two types of subordination can be distinguished: private and general. In private subordination, the subordinate clause extends one member of the main clause. Consequently, subordinate clauses can correlate with different syntactic functions of the main one (for example, The boy who sold apples left. (correlated with the subject). I saw that the boy was selling apples. (correlated with the predicate). I saw the boy who sold apples. ( correlates with the addition)). General subordination implies correlation with the main clause as a whole, that is, the subordinate clause extends the situation as a whole (for example, He was late for a meeting, which happened to him extremely rarely.). In some cases, the difference between SSP and NGN can be realized only with the help of intonation, and in writing with the help of punctuation marks (for example, The forest is being cut down - the chips are flying (increased intonation on the word “cut”, this is an NGN with cause-and-effect relationships). Forest they chop, the chips fly (intonation of enumeration, SSP)). If a complex subordinate construction contains several subordinate clauses, then two more types of subordination can be distinguished: sequential and parallel. With sequential subordination, each subsequent clause extends the previous one, and depending on the degree of distance of the subordinate clauses from the main clause, a hierarchy of subordinate clauses is carried out (for example, Yesterday John came to us to tell us how he got to his home where he had not been for many years ). In this case, you can set the depth of subordination, which is equal to three, while the subordinate clauses themselves distinguish, respectively, three hierarchical levels according to the degree of distance from the main one.

With parallel subordination, all subordinate clauses are related to the main clause. Two main options for parallel subordination can be observed:

All subordinate clauses correlate with different parts of the sentence of the main clause (for example, While John's wife was unpacking at the hotel, he himself went to inspect the city, which made a pleasant impression on him. The first subordinate clause extends the predicate to the main clause, the second correlates with the complement of the main clause.) .

Subordinate clauses can correlate with the same member of the sentence of the main clause, while the parallel subordination can be homogeneous (for example, He remembered that he was very cold, that even tea did not warm him. Both subordinate clauses are homogeneous (additional clauses) and correlate with one member) and heterogeneous (for example, When it was dawn, John quickly went so that the train would not leave without him. The subordinate clauses correspond to the word “went”, but the first subordinate clause is of time, and the second is of purpose).