简明新编英语语言学教程教案(21)

----a branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.

2. Transformational Generative Grammar (TG)

Norm. Chomsky, the most influential linguist in 20th century, some important works: (1957) Syntactic Structure;

(1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax;

(1981) Lectures on Government and Binding;

(1986) Barriers

(1993) A Minimalist Program for Linguistic Theory;

(1995) The Minimalist Program;

(1998) The Minimalist Inquiry……

3. Criteria on good grammar

Observational adequacy

Descriptive adequacy

Explanatory adequacy

The ultimate goal for any theory is to explain.

TG differs from traditional grammar in that it not only aims at language description, but also its explanation.

Chomsky is much more interested in the similarities (language universals) between languages rather than their differences.

Linguists should attempt to find a grammatical framework which will be suitable for all languages;

Linguists should concentrate on the elements and constructions that are available to all languages rather than on elements that actually occur in all languages.

There are likely to be universal constraints on the ways linguistic elements are combined

Chomsky proposed that the grammars of all human languages share a common framework (Universal Grammar).

4. Categories

Category refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. The most central categories to the syntactic study are the word-level categories (traditionally, parts of speech)

4.1 Word-level categories

Major lexical categories: N, V, Adj, Prep.

Minor Lexical categories: Det, Deg, Qual, Auxi, Conj.

4.2The criteria on which categories are determined

Meaning

Inflection

Distribution

Note: The most reliable criterion of determining a word’s category is its distribution.

4.3 Phrase categories and their structures

a. Phrase categories----the syntactic units that are built around a certain word category

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