Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Three aspects of syntactic structure
- 2 Identifying constituents and categories
- 3 Passives, applicatives, and “Dative Shift”
- 4 Reflexives
- 5 Control
- 6 Pragmatic functions: topic and focus
- 7 Filler–gap dependencies and relativization
- 8 Causative constructions
- 9 Serial verbs and related issues
- 10 “Quirky case” and subjecthood
- 11 Syntactic ergativity
- References
- General index
- Language index
1 - Three aspects of syntactic structure
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Three aspects of syntactic structure
- 2 Identifying constituents and categories
- 3 Passives, applicatives, and “Dative Shift”
- 4 Reflexives
- 5 Control
- 6 Pragmatic functions: topic and focus
- 7 Filler–gap dependencies and relativization
- 8 Causative constructions
- 9 Serial verbs and related issues
- 10 “Quirky case” and subjecthood
- 11 Syntactic ergativity
- References
- General index
- Language index
Summary
Probably no one has ever before said or heard the following sentence, yet any normal adult speaker of English will understand it:
John Adams could have been elected to a fourth term as President, if his step-sister had not been so ugly.
In the same way, a speaker of any language will say and hear many sentences during the course of a normal day which he has never said or heard before. Moreover, other speakers of the same language will not only recognize these original creations as being well-formed sentences but will also (usually) understand what they mean.
These observations tell us something important about the nature of language. A person who knows how to speak a language does not have to memorize every possible sentence in that language. Rather, speakers produce sentences Creatively. Some common phrases and sentences may be repeated so often that they are memorized as a single unit, e.g., idioms and proverbs. But, for the most part, we do not memorize sentences; rather, we construct them when we need them, to express a particular idea.
This creative use of language is possible because the patterns of a language are determined by a set of Rules. A speaker who (unconsciously) “knows” these rules can use them to create and understand any number of new sentences.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Analyzing SyntaxA Lexical-Functional Approach, pp. 1 - 21Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004