Elements of Structural Syntax
Open Access
- 11 February 2015
- book
- Published by John Benjamins Publishing Company
Abstract
This volume appears now finally in English, sixty years after the death of its author, Lucien Tesnière. It has been translated from the French original into German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and now at long last into English as well. The volume contains a comprehensive approach to the syntax of natural languages, an approach that is foundational for an entire stream in the modern study of syntax and grammar. This stream is known today as dependency grammar (DG). Drawing examples from dozens of languages, many of which he was proficient in, Tesnière presents insightful analyses of numerous phenomena of syntax. Among the highlights are the concepts of valency and head-initial vs. head-final languages. These concepts are now taken for granted by most modern theories of syntax, even by phrase structure grammars, which represent, in a sense, the opposite sort of approach to syntax from what Tesnière was advocating.Keywords
This publication has 22 references indexed in Scilit:
- Dependency LinguisticsLinguistik Aktuell/linguistics Today, 2014
- The Prague Dependency TreebankPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2003
- Syntax der deutschen SprachePublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,2000
- Lucien Tesnière - Syntaxe structurale et opérations mentalesPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1996
- What’s a Head?Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,1996
- Les Éléments de syntaxe structurale, de L. TesnièreLangue française, 1969
- Dependency systems and phrase-structure systemsInformation and Control, 1965
- Dependency Theory: A Formalism and Some ObservationsLanguage, 1964
- Syntactic StructuresPublished by Walter de Gruyter GmbH ,1957
- A Quasi-Arithmetical Notation for Syntactic DescriptionLanguage, 1953