X - BAR SYNTAX

X - BAR SYNTAX

Robert N. St. Clair

INTRODUCTION

The traditional parts of speech have undergone many changes since their inception among the Roman grammarians. The structuralists found them to be inadequate in accounting for the kinds of grammatical categories that exist among most of the non-European languages in the world. When Chomsky developed his model of transformational grammar, he returned to the issue of the traditional parts of speech. He argued that all languages should have similar parts of speech. The reasons for this assertion is based on his assumption that there are universal phrase structure rules that operate across all languages. The universal parts of speech in the earliest model of his grammar were few in number (NP, Det, AUX, VP, S) but with the passage of time they were expanded to include other lexical and phrasal categories.LEXICAL CATEGORIES N = NounV = VerbAUX = Auxiliary VerbA = AdjectiveADV = AdverbDET = DeterminerDEG = Degree of ExpressionCONJ = Coordinating ConjunctionPRO = Pro Constituent or Pro FormQ = Quantifier PHRASAL CATEGORIES S = Sentence or ClauseNP = Noun PhraseVP = Verb PhraseAP = Adjectival PhrasePP = Prepositional PhraseADVP = Adverbial PhraseQP = Quantifier Phrase THE PROBLEM WITH PHRASE STRUCTURE CATEGORIES Linguists began to notice that there were problems with the aforementioned lexical and phrasal categories. The problem was that they needed another kind of category between lexical and phrasal categories. For the present, this new level will be called the X-Bar category.Phrasal Categories X-Bar Categories Lexical Categories The reason that they needed these new "phrase structure nodes" had to do with the process of pronominalization. This occurs when a Noun or a Noun Phrase is substituted by a pro-form. The man saw Harry (Noun) The man saw him (Pronoun)I like fast cars (Noun Phrase)I like them (Pro Noun Phrase) Linguists discovered that other kinds of constituents are pronominalized. These constituents are neither full noun phrases nor mere lexical phrases, but phrases that are intermediate to these, viz., X-Bar Categories. Consider the example of "very tall" in the following phrase marker:

The 2008 Beijing Olympic

2008 Beijing Olympic

The Uyghur PIC

The Uyghur Yingsar Knife



Uyghur (Uighur, Uygur, Uigur)

语言学的流派

1、历史比较语言学，奠基人：丹麦的拉斯克、德国的格里姆和葆扑；2、结构语言学，包括布拉格学派、哥本哈根学派、美国描写语言学派；3、转换生成学派；4、系统功能学派；5、社会语言学派。主要的语言学家及其代表作 索绪尔 （瑞士） 《普通语言学教程》被称为现代语言学之父 布龙菲尔德（美国）《语言论》是美国结构主义语言学的奠基性著作。 特鲁贝茨科依（俄国）《音位学原理》 是布拉格学派的杰出代表。 乔姆斯基（美国）《句法结构》是转换生成学派的代表。 高本汉（瑞典）《中国音韵学研究》 韩礼徳 （英国）《功能语法导论》系统功能学派代表 拉波天（美国）〈语言演变理论的经验基础〉社会语言学代表 赵元任（中国）〈现代吴语的研究〉〈音位标音法的多能性〉 叶尔姆斯列夫(丹麦）《语言理论导论》哥本哈根学派代表十四、为什么说历史比较语言学在语言学史上具有重要地位？ 历史比较语言学从前又称比较语法，通过语言亲属关系的比较研究语言的发展规律，拟测它们的共同母语。历史比较语言学是在19世纪逐步发展和完善的，主要是印欧语系的历史比较，19世纪之前，这种研究不是没有，但都是孤立的分散的研究，到19世纪才进入系统的研究，并使语言学走上独立发展的道路。19世纪历史比较语言学家为语言学的发展做出了重要贡献。他们收集了丰富的语言材料，进行了广泛深入的调查和比较，不仅提出了人类语言演变过程的假设，画出了世界语言的譜系，而且还创造出比较科学的研究方法，提出了有关语言起源、语言本质的新理论，为后来结构主义和描写语言学的产生和发展创造了有利条件。

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