Syntactic structure of the claus (simple sentence). The model of the members of the sentence.
The process of analysing sentences into their parts, or constituents, is known as parsing.
The syntactic structure of the sentence can be analysed at 2 levels: pre-functional (constituents are words and word-groups) and functional (constituents are parts of the sentence).
Parts of the sentence are notional sentence constituents which are in certain syntactic relations to other constituents or to the sentence as a whole.
Parts of the sentence:
1) principal parts of the sentence - the predication (the basic structure of the sentence),
2) secondary parts of the sentence extend or expand the basic structure.
Parts of the sentence are notional constituents: they name elements of events or situations denoted by the sentence: actions, states, participants and circumstances. The formal properties of parts of the sentence are the type of syntactic relations and the morphological expression.
Principal parts of the sentence are interdependent. The subject is structural centre of the sentence. The predicate agrees with the subject in person and number. The predicate is the semantic and communicative centre of the sentence.
Secondary parts of the sentence are modifiers of principal and other secondary parts: attributes are noun-adjuncts, objects and adverbial modifiers are primarily verb adjuncts. Besides the three ?traditional? secondary parts, two more are singled out: the apposition and the objective predicative.
Accordingly to the structure parts of the sentence:
1) simple expressed by words and phrases;
2) compound, consisting of the structural and notional part (compound verbal and nominal predicate, subject with the introductory it and there);
3) complex, expressed by secondary predications (typical of secondary parts of the sentence).
The model of parts of the sentence shows the basic relations of notional sentence constituents. It does not show the linear order of constituents.
23.Structural models of sentence analysis. Distributional model and types of distribution. IC-model.
Methods of of structural linguistics are based on the notions of position, co-occurrence and substitution (substitutability).
The total set of environments of a certain element is its distribution. The term distribution denotes the occurrence of an element relative to other elements. Elements may be in:
1) non-contrastive distribution (the same position, no difference in meaning; variants of the same element): hoofs - hooves;
2) contrastive distribution (the same position, different meanings): She is charming. She is charmed.
3) complementary distribution (mutual exclusiveness of pairs of forms in a certain environment; the same meaning, different positions; variants of the same element): cows - oxen.
The distributional model (Ch.Fries) shows the linear order of sentence constituents. The syntactic structure of the sentence is presented as a sequence of positional classes of words. Showing the linear order of classes of words the model does not show the syntactic relations of sentence constituents. It does not show the ambiguity of sentence.
This drawback is overcome by the IC-model. A sentence is a structured string of words, grouped into phrases. So sentence constituents are words and word-groups. The basic principle for grouping words into phrases (endo- or exocentric) is cohesion, or the possibility to substitute one word for the whole group without destroying the sentence structure. The sentence is built by 2 immediate constituents: NP+VP, each of which may have constituents of its own. Constituents which cannot be further divided are called ultimate (UC). The I? model exists in 2 main versions: the analytical model and the derivation tree. The analytical model divides the sentence into IC-s and UC-s. The derivation tree shows the syntactic dependence of sentence constituents.
So the IC-model shows both the syntactic relations and the linear order of elements.