Mapa conceptual Genetti

Syntax:

Words in combination

Content structure

Units contain units

The noun phrase

is a grammatically

The adpositional phrase

a syntactic constituent

Other types of syntactic constituents

Each language

coherent syntactic constituent containing a head noun or a pronoun and optionally one or more modifiers.

consisting of an adposition (preposition or postposition), which is the head of the constituent, and a dependent noun phrase

needs to be examined independently in order to determine which syntactic constituents form the building blocks of the syntax.

Recursive structures in syntax

design principles of constituent structure

is recursion, or the ability for a phrasal constituent to embed another phrasal constituent of the same type within it.

The clause

can be defined

as a syntactic unit typically consisting of a verb (in some languages within a verb phrase), its noun phrase arguments, and optional adverbial elements (usually adverbs and adpositional phrases)

Arguments and transitivity

The term argument refers to a noun phrase,

emphasizes the grammatical status of the argument in relation to the verb.

core arguments

oblique arguments

Grammatical relations: subjects

are one type of core noun phrase

Languages across the world differ in the grammatical properties that define subjects.

Grammatical relations: objects

objects have different grammatical properties from subjects

indirect objects occur only with ditransitive verbs.

Transitive and ditransitive verbs have objects

Constructions

active clauses

For such tasks, languages have a variety of constructions, fixed grammatical patterns associated with particular functions.

a polar question

a question that one could answer with a simple “yes” or “no” response

linguistic typology

can tell us much about how linguistic structures are used to meet speakers’ communicative needs.

The sentence

A sentence is an integrated syntactic unit consisting of at least one clause and optionally adverbials that have scope over the sentence as a whole

Clause-combining: coordination versus subordination

A complex sentence is a sentence with more than one clause.

Clauses can be combined either by coordinating two independent clauses using a conjunction

Coordination combines two clauses in linear sequence using a conjunction

Adverbial clauses

are dependent clauses that are linked to a matrix clause using either an adverbial conjunction or an affix that specifies the semantic relationship between clauses.

Complement clauses

are dependent clauses that function as noun phrase arguments of verbs.

Relative clauses

are embedded within noun phrases and function as dependent modifiers of nouns

we can structurally contrast complement clauses with relative clauses