By Maggie Tallerman
Assuming no past wisdom, Understanding Syntax illustrates the foremost thoughts, different types and terminology linked to the learn of cross-linguistic syntax. A theory-neutral and descriptive point of view is taken all through. beginning with an summary of what syntax is, the booklet strikes directly to an evidence of note sessions (such as noun, verb, adjective) after which to a dialogue of sentence constitution within the world’s languages. Grammatical structures and relationships among phrases in a clause are defined and carefully illustrated, together with grammatical family members similar to topic and item; function-changing tactics comparable to the passive and antipassive; case and contract strategies, together with either ergative and accusative alignments; verb serialization; head-marking and dependent-marking grammars; configurational and non-configurational languages; questions and relative clauses. the ultimate bankruptcy explains and illustrates the foundations excited about writing a short syntactic caricature of a language, permitting the reader to build a grammatical comic strip of a language recognized to them. information from nearly a hundred languages appears to be like within the textual content, with languages representing largely differing geographical components and specific language households. The ebook might be crucial for classes in cross-linguistic syntax, language typology, and linguistic fieldwork, in addition to for uncomplicated syntactic description.
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Additional info for Understanding Syntax
Example text
However, each of the word orders in (34) is attested (= found) amongst the world’s languages, though some are much more common than others (see Chapter 6). The three most common 20 Understanding syntax basic word orders in languages other than English are those of (34a), (34b) and (34c). 1 that Japanese has the basic word order of (34b), and Welsh the basic order of (34c). Malagasy, spoken in Madagascar, has the basic order in (34d). The two word orders in (34e) and (34f) are the rarest basic word orders in the languages of the world, although they are found in the Carib language family of the Amazon basin.
This book contains examples from a wide variety of languages, including English. At first you may find it difficult to study examples from unfamiliar languages, and perhaps you wonder why we don’t just use examples from English. There are two main reasons for using foreign-language examples: to learn about the differences between languages, and to learn about the similarities between them. First, then, languages don’t all look the same, and examining just our own language and its immediate relatives doesn’t show how much languages can differ.
Kim is so/less __ . b. *Kim looked really/too/very/quite engine. *Kim seems engine. *Kim’s as engine as Chris. *Kim is so/less engine. Second, engine can never take the typical adjective endings -er, -est, as in untidier, happiest (and nor can we say *more engine, *most engine). So engine never has the same set of word forms as an adjective either. But it does take the plural -s suffix of nouns, as in Kim drives engines. Another way to use distributional evidence is to show that nouns and adjectives are MODIFIED by different word classes: they keep different company.