A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics David Crystal

syntax 471
relationships can be established at all levels of analysis. In tagmemic grammar,
however, the term syntagmeme is used in a restricted sense, referring to
a unit in a grammatical hierarchy seen from the viewpoint of the elements
(or tagmemes) it includes; e.g. the sentence is a syntagmeme for the clauses
that constitute it.
(2) In psycholinguistics, the term is sometimes used to refer to a class of
associative responses which people make when hearing a stimulus word, viz.
those which fall into a different word-class from the stimulus, in that the
response word could precede or follow the stimulus word in a sentence. A syntagmatic
response or association would be drive following car, sheep following
black, etc. The syntagmatic/paradigmatic shift refers to a change in the patterns
of response noted in children at around age seven, when the earlier pattern
(of primarily syntagmatic associations) develops into the more adult-like pattern
primarily involving paradigmatic associations.
syntagmeme (n.)
see syntagmatic (1), tagmemics
syntax (n.) A traditional term for the study of the rules governing the way
words are combined to form sentences in a language. In this use, syntax is
opposed to morphology, the study of word structure. An alternative definition
(avoiding the concept of ‘word’) is the study of the interrelationships between
elements of sentence structure, and of the rules governing the arrangement
of sentences in sequences. In this use, one might then talk of the ‘syntax of the
word’. In initial formulations of generative linguistics, the syntactic component
is one of three major organizational units within a grammar (the others being
phonological and semantic), containing rules for the generation of syntactic
structures (e.g. phrase-structure rules, transformational rules). The exact
nature of the syntactic rules within this component varies from one grammatical
theory to another. Syntactic structures (patterns, or constructions) are
analysable into sequences of syntactic categories or syntactic classes, these being
established on the basis of the syntactic relationships linguistic items have with
other items in a construction. Some studies propose an analysis whereby categories
are analysed as sets of syntactic features, to permit a greater degree of
generalization across categories. For example, using the features V (= verbal) and
N (= nominal), it is suggested that the four categories of verb, noun, adjective
and preposition can be analysed respectively as:
G+V J G−V J G+V J G−V J , , and .
I−NL I+NL I+NL I−NL
This kind of approach is referred to as feature-based syntax. Both positive and
negative sub-categorization features can be used, either singly or in combination,
depending on the syntactic facts and on the analytic principles proposed.
The study of the field as a whole is known as syntactic theory. Studying the
sequential arrangements of syntax is sometimes referred to as syntactics, but
there is a possibility of confusion here with the earlier use of this term as one of
the three major divisions of semiotics (along with pragmatics and semantics).
The adjective form of ‘syntax’ in modern linguistics is syntactic, as in the above