Assuming no prior knowledge, Understanding Syntaxillustrates the major concepts, categories and terminology associated with the study of cross-linguistic syntax. A theory-neutral and descriptive viewpoint is taken throughout. Starting with an overview of what syntax is, the book moves on to an explanation of word classes (such as noun, verb, adjective) and then to a discussion of sentence structure in the world’s languages. Grammatical constructions and relationships between words in a clause are explained and thoroughly illustrated, including grammatical relations such as subject and object; function-changing processes such as the passive and antipassive; case and agreement processes, including both ergative and accusative alignments; verb serialization; head-marking and dependent-marking grammars; configurational and non-configurational languages; questions and relative clauses. The final chapter explains and illustrates the principles involved in writing a brief syntactic sketch of a language, enabling the reader to construct a grammatical sketch of a language known to them. Data from approximately 100 languages appears in the text, with languages representing widely differing geographical areas and distinct language families. The book will be essential for courses in cross-linguistic syntax, language typology, and linguistic fieldwork, as well as for basic syntactic description.
Tallerman
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Weitere Infos & Material
Acknowledgements
Note to the instructor
Note to the student
List of abbreviations used in examples
List of tables
List of figures
1 What is syntax
2 Words belong to different classes
3 Looking inside sentences
4 Heads and their dependents
5 How do we identify constituents?
6 Relationships within the clause
7 Processes that change grammatical relations
8 Wh-constructions: questions and relative clauses
9 Asking questions about syntax
Sources of data used in examples
Glossary
References
Language index
Subject index
Maggie Tallerman is Professor of Linguistics at Newcastle University, UK.
