The Status of Syntactic Structures in Foreign Linguistics

Abstract

The article envisages historiography of treating syntactic structures, namely sentences, by foreign scholars. Modern syntactic theories embrace twofold sentence description. For one thing, sentence is treated as an organised system, hierarchically structured, but not as some indiscreet unit, and, consequently, sentence is analysed within syntactic paradigmatics. For another thing, sentence is considered within its inner immediate constituents specification where we use different methods (Tmethod, valency method, component analysis, IC-method, etc.). While comparing syntactical structures investigated in traditional grammars with those of other grammars typical of many foreign trends and schools we can observe many alternative concepts and formalised systems. There are some similarities within types of framework. It is assumed that words make up phrases, and by combining a noun with other constituents speakers form a noun phrase. Likewise by combining a verb/ preposition/ adjective/ adverb with one or more constituents they can form a verb phrase, prepositional phrase, adjectival phrase, adverbial phrase. But there are two major differences between two types of framework. One is that minimalism (unlike Traditional Grammar) assumes that function words also project into phrases, by combining a present or past tense auxiliary/ T with a complement and a subject we form a Tense projection/ TP, and by combining a complementiser with a TP we form a complementiser projection/ CP. This in some cases results in an analysis which is rather different from that found in traditional grammar. A phrase is treated in our work as a polynominational syntactic unit which represents a complex referent situation and renders the language system by definite syntactic patterns. The research objective of this article is to analyse different syntactic conceptions in foreign linguistics and the main aspects of sentence studies. If the traditional linguistics concentrates on the study of the formal, structural and semantic properties of syntactical structures, in the cognitive linguistics the sentence, its syntactic structure or pattern, is understood in terms of conceptualisation, that is how the sentence as a particular syntactic model performs the concept structuring function. There are two main approaches to the study of the sentence in cognitive linguistics. The first focuses on the concepts represented by syntactic constructions, their nature, content and structure. The second trend considers the sentence typology and principles of sentence classification.

У статті розглядаються різні концепції статусних характеристик синтаксичних одиниць, зокрема речення, у зарубіжній лінгвістиці. Речення аналізується у різних площинах: структурній, семантичній / номінативній, прагматичній / комунікативній, когнітивній. Словосполучення має статус поліномінативної синтаксичної одиниці, що відтворює комплексну ситуацію і реалізує певні структурні схеми на синтаксичному рівні.