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English Syntax in a Nutshell.A frame-to-chain...
E-book
This academic textbook is addressed to students of English linguistics as an introductory course on syntax, but also to anyone interested in the composition of the English sentence, whether affiliated with academia, school teachers or practising translators. The textbook pursues the Prague Linguistic School tradition of functional structuralism along with an onomasiological perspective as the major methodological focus of the Košice Onomasiological School of Linguistics. Within an onomasiological approach to syntactic analysis the key to the identification of surface structures (ranked as Phrases, Clauses, and Sentences on the syntactic pyramid) is the syntactic meaning (a frame-to-chain approach). The syntactic analysis starts with identification of the arrangement of semantic roles (a deep valency frame) and proceeds to determine a surface valency chain, often several of them, by means of surface grammatical and structural tests. Readers are encouraged to use their intuitions in deciphering the syntactic meaning and identifying the surface chain capable of its activation in both the English sentence analysis as well as cross-linguistically.