Natural Syntax of English: transitivity

• Authors: Janez Orešnik
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The framework of this paper is Natural Syntax initiated by the author in the tradition of (morphological) naturalness as established by Wolfgang U. Dressler and Willi Mayerthaler. Natural Syntax is a pseudodeductive linguistic theory, and this is its most recent version. The naturalness judgements are couched in naturalness scales, which follow from the basic parameters (or "axioms") listed at the beginning of the paper. The predictions of the theory are calculated in what are known as deductions, the chief components of each being a pair of naturalness scales and the rules governing the alignment of corresponding naturalness values. Parallel and chiastic alignment is distinguished and related to Henning Andersen's early work on markedness. The basic idea is to illustrate how a (pseudo)deductive theory of syntax performs if it insists on avoiding abstract solutions, and in particular on excluding any generative component. Natural Syntax is exemplified here with selected English cases of transitivity. Special attention is given to relative-frequency phenomena.

Keywords

EN

naturalness; syntax; transitivity; Enlgish

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Journal: Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 48
• Pages: 315-336

Dates

published

2012

received

2011-08-10

revised

2012-02-27

accepted

2012-03-14

Contributors

author

Janez Orešnik

• University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/psicl-2012-0014