My Reflection of Chapter 4 Syntax 13.12.25作业

英语语言学

专升本2班 卫旭 2012052219 My Reflection of Chapter 4 Syntax

After studying the book A New Concise Course in Linguistics for Students of English, what impressed me most is Chapter 4 Syntax. Because I had never analyzed sentences in this way before. It helps me greatly to understand a sentence more clearly.

What’t more, I did not know what linguistics is about until I studied this course, which provides me a general idea of linguistics study. Generally speaking, linguistics is the scientific study of language. Why is it a science? Because linguistics is based on the systematic investigation of linguistic data, conducted with reference to some general theory of language structure. However, the most beneficial knowledge is by studying Chapter 4, I learned these :

Syntax refers to the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language, or simply, the study of the formation of sentences. There are three major approaches to syntax: structural approach, functional approach, and communicative approach. Traditionally, a sentence is regarded as a sequence of words. Consequently, the study of sentences formation involves a great deal of the study of words. In syntax, linguists study the words by define their category, number, gender, case, tense, aspect, concord, and government. Among the three approaches, the most influential one is structural approach, which is also named as transformational-generative approach

英语语言学

专升本2班 卫旭 2012052219 proposed by Chomsky. Chomsky tried to find out a system of rules to account for the linguistic competence to form grammatical sentences. Transformational-generative grammar is a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Structuralists also lay criteria on good grammar: observational adequacy, descriptive adequacy, explanatory adequacy, and explanatory adequacy. Moreover, structural linguists find that sentences do not only have a linear structure, but also have a hierarchical structure. For example, in the sentence “the boy kicked the ball”, the relation between the and boy in closer than that between boy and kicked. Usually, sentences and phrases are referred to as constructions. The component elements of construction are called constituents. In order to analyze the sentences, there is one important and old approach--Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC Analysis). It is originated from structuralism. It refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents--word group, which is in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their won, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. Sometimes linguists use tree diagram to keep record of sentence construction. This method exerts a great influence on modern linguistic study.

In conclusion, this course helps me develop a better understanding and deeper cognition of the lingual phenomenon around us. And it really gives me a hand in studying english.

英语语言学

专升本2班 卫旭 2012052219