环球时代英语专业考研 MTI 翻译硕士 专四专八 日语考研等Chapter 4 Syntax4.1 The traditional approach4.1.1 Number, gender and case4.1.2 Tense and aspect[For these two sections, please consult materials on traditional English grammar. – icywarmtea]4.1.3 Concord and governmentConcord (a.k.a. agreement) may be defined as the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories. E.g. in English the determiner and the noun it precedes should concord in number as in this man, these men. And the form of a subject should agree with that of the verb in terms of number in the present tense, e.g. He speaks English; They speak English.Government is another type of control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic construction. It differs from concord in that this is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category. E.g. in English, the pronoun after a verb or a preposition should be in the object form as in She gave him a book; She gave a book to him. In other words, the verb, or the preposition, governs the form of the pronoun after it. The former is the governor, and the latter is the governed.4.2 The structural approach4.2.1 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationsSyntagmatic (a.k.a. horizontal / chain) relation is a relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present, such as the relation between weather and the others in the following sentence: If the weather is nice, we’ll go out.Paradigmatic (a.k.a. vertical / choice) relation is a relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent.4.2.2 Immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis)1. How to do itImmediate constituents are constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction, which may be a sentence or a word group or a word.Immediate constituent analysis, IC analysis for short, refers to the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents – word groups 环球时代英语专业考研 MTI 翻译硕士 专四专八 日语考研等(phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate sake of convenience. The IC analysis of a sentence may be carried out with brackets or shown with a tree diagram. E.g.Poor John ran away. →(1) ((Poor) (John)) ((ran) (away)).(2)Poor John ran away2. Its advantagesThrough IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, any ambiguities, if any, will be revealed in that IC analysis emphasizes not only the linear structure of the sentence but also the hierarchical structure of the sentence. E.g. the sentence Leave the book on the shelf. is ambiguous. It has two meanings: (1) Put the book on the shelf; (2) Don’t touch the book on the shelf. These two meanings can be shown by the following tree diagrams. (Omitted. See the textbook p125~128.) 3. Its problemsHowever, IC analysis has three disadvantages. First, at the beginning, some advocator insisted on binary divisions. Any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not possible. E.g. Old men and women is ambiguous in that it may mean old + men and women or old men + and women. It’s impossible to combine with only the preceding part or only the succeeding part. Second, constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis. E.g. the phrasal verbs like make up, turn on, or give up will cause problems in that when the object is expressed by a pronoun, it will interrupt the phrasal verb as in make it up. The most serious problem is that there are structural ambiguities which cannot be revealed by IC analysis. E.g. the tree diagram and the labels can only do one analysis for the love of God.4.2.3 Endocentric and exocentric constructionsAn endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent, or approaching equivalence, to one of its constituents, which serves as the center, or head, of the whole. It is also called headed construction. Typical endocentric constructions are noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases. They may be further divided into two subtypes: subordinate and coordinate constructions. Those, in which there is only one head, with the head being dominant and the other constructions dependent, are subordinate constructions. In the coordinate construction, there are more 环球时代英语专业考研 MTI 翻译硕士 专四专八 日语考研等than one head, e.g. boys and girls, in which the two content constituents, boys and girls, are of equal syntactic status, and no one is dependent on the other.The exocentric construction is defined negatively as a construction whose distribution is not functionally equivalent to any of its constituents. There is no noticeable center or head in it. Typical exocentric constructions are prepositional phrases, su。