Syntactic means of English

Syntactic means are means expressing syntactic relations between words. They are as follows: word order, word forms, function words, intonation.

Word order plays a certain part in expressing syntactic relations between words in such languages as Russian and Ukrainian as well. But in English dew to scarcity of inflected forms it acquires special significance.

English is characterized by contact arrangements of words according to which words connected by sense are placed nearly:

a tall man, to read a book.

Word order fulfils two functions here: 1) it indicates that the words are connected by sense; 2) it expresses some syntactic meanings.

In the sentence “Peter sees John” the word order alone is not sufficient to express the connections between words. A certain choice of their forms is also needed. The sentence in which the inflexion of the third person singular –s would not be used –would be conceived as grammatically wrong.

Function words – prepositions and conjunctions. Preposition in English can denote the same relations which in other languages are denoted by means of case inflections: of, to, by (with).

Conjunctions express various relations between words, parts of a composite sentence and even independent sentences.

Due to intonation we can distinguish between a declarative sentence and a general question:

You were fond of her. You were fond of her?

Types of syntactic bonds

Syntactic bound is a bound between words in a sentence. There are four types of syntactic bounds: coordinate bound, subordinate bound, predicative bound and accumulative bound. There are three types of subordinate bound: agreement, government and adjournment, the latter being typical of English. In Ukrainian “вродлива дівчина” is agreement, in English “a pretty girl” is adjournment.

The word group

A word group is any group of two or more notional words united by one syntactic bound.

The meaning of the word group is not a mere sum of meaning of its components. They undergo some syntactic modifications and acquire some syntactic characteristics.

By grammatical form of the word group we mean its pattern (for. example: A+N, N+N, V+N, etc.). By grammatical meaning of the word group we understand semantic relations between its components, which are revealed by the syntactic bond (for example: attributive, objective, adverbial relations).

There exists four types of syntactic bonds between the components of the word group: coordination, subordination, interdependence and accumulation. The accumulation bond can be identizied only on the background of an element which is not a component of the given group: (to write) him a letter, some old (books).

According to their inner structure word groups are divided into nuclear ones and non-nuclear ones. Nuclear word groups are based upon subordinate bonds. According to the position of the adjunct nuclear word groups are subdivided into regressive (e.g. very interesting) and progressive (e.g. a friend of mine). The components of non-nuclear word groups are connected by one of the three types of relations: interdependence, coordination and accumulations.

According to their structure word groups are divided into different patterns: N+N, N’s + N, A+N, V+N, etc..