chapter 4 from word to text.ppt

Lecture 4 From Word to Text
Presented by: Zhang Mingfang
Dept. of Foreign Languages, HEBUST
Syntax
Syntax (﹤Greek)refers to the study of the rules governing the ways words bined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences.
Question:
How do you approach sentences? How does your teacher analyze sentences?
I. The Traditional Approach
Traditionally, a sentence is seen as a sequence of words. The study of sentence formation, therefore, involves a great deal of the study of words, such as, the classification of words in terms of parts of speech, the identification of functions of words in terms of subject, predicate, etc.
Category(范畴)
A class or group of items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a language.
Categories refer to parts of speech and functions, such as the classification of words in terms of parts of speech, the identification of functions of words in terms of subject, predicate, etc.
But the term “category” is also more specifically used for the defining properties of units like noun and verb, . the noun is usually said to have the categories of number, gender, case and countability; the verb the categories of tense, aspect, voice.
Number: noun, pronoun, verb, (adjectives and articles in French); singular and plural, (dual in classical Greek and Arabic), (trial in Fijian).
None in Chinese
们---我/你/他们,学生们,工人们;
*桌子们,计算机们;
*五个学生们,很多老师们
1. Number, gender, case
Gender: male, female: actor/tress, hero/ine, prince/ss, lion/ess in English by the biological distinctions; in Chinese,女、男、公、母、雄、雌、阴、阳; French are grammatical, nouns (animate or not) have gender distinctions, . chanteur (chanteuse), chanson (f.), canon (m.), capitalism (m.)
Case: 3 cases in English---nominative, accusative, genitive of pronouns; 2 cases of nouns---general, John, boy; genitive, John’s, boy’s
In Latin there are six including nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative and ablative.
The dative case is shown by p