Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
15 Theorising syntactic relations (ii): transitivity
Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
Edward McDonald [+]
University of Auckland.
Description
Now that syntax is established as an independent field of study, there are two major theoretical decisions to be made: firstly, how to theorise syntactic relations, including the relationship between syntactic categories and semantic ones; and secondly, how to model syntactic patterning. In Chapters 14 and 15 the first of these themes is explored, tracing the theorisation of syntactic relations in terms of two concepts from traditional grammar which both date back to Greek and Roman antiquity: case and transitivity. Both concepts are in origin morphological ones, used to explain aspects of the inflectional patterning of Greek and Latin, but in the last half-century have been reinterpreted syntactically, and in some cases semantically, to characterise clause structure in terms of an array of noun functions (Chapter 14) or of clause types (Chapter 15). The history of these concepts, which show up in some form or other in most current syntactic theories, shows how in syntax, as in most fields, old ways of thinking have remarkable staying power if they can be reinterpreted to meet current needs.