(4) The boy sees the girl. Similarly, (5) is structured in analogy with (2), and (6) with (3), although their cognitive patterns differ. (5) The sun shines. (6) The man is older than you. In (6), a relation between two members is referred to, and the structure of many languages makes the speaker treat one of the members as prominent, expressed by the subject, i.e. regard the relation as a property of this member. Similarly, with actions more complex than those for which the structure of natural language was primarily prepared, it is often necessary to choose one of the participants as the (analog of the) deliberate causer or initiator of the action, although this may not be cognitively appropriate. Thus, for example with (7), at least a certain degree of activity (approval) is necessary on both sides. (7) Jim bought a car from Philip. Thus, an action constitutes the prototypical content of an assertion. This corresponds to the conditions in which language came into being, and also to those in which language acquisition normally starts.2 The lexical counterpart of an action is a verb, and one of the points in which the communicative function of language has been decisive for sentence structure is the central role of the verb in the sentence. The grammatical categories corresponding to modal, temporal and aspectual parameters of actions generally concentrate on the verb, and the valency of the verb determines the possible and the necessary ingredients of the sentence. The lexical units filling these valency slots display their own valency and, together with their complementations, they specify, step by step, the content of the sentence, the main point of which (the action or another event, state, etc.) is referred to or denoted by the verb. With such a view of the basis of syntax, it may be understood that constituency, although now accepted by several major trends in theoretical linguistics, is not the only possible starting point. The concept of (immediate) constituents has been taken over by Chomsky and his followers (as well as by those developing new ap proaches reacting to his theory with a high degree of polemical attitudes) from Bloomfieldian descriptive linguistics, whose view of language Chomsky has found unsatisfactory in perhaps all other respects. An (98)
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approach based on views known from classical European structural and functional linguistics may constitute a challenge for the main trends in the theory of language, since with the exception of Fillmore’s Case Theory, it was not registered in these trends that a view of syntax based on dependency has been elaborated in Europe. Similarly like Igor Meľčuk, Richard Hudson, Jurij Apresjan, Jürgen Kunze, Stanley Starosta, Peter Hellwig and many other linguists, the Prague group of theoretical and computational linguistics has found the dependency based approach adequate for a theoretical description, as well as for a computational treatment. This approach helps to describe the language system not just as an abstract mechanism enumerating sentences with their structural descrip tion, but rather as substantially influenced by communicative factors. The sentence should be described with due regard to its position in the context, including the aspects analyzed by M. A. K. Halliday under the headings of focus and theme. An elaboration of the classical Prague views has led to an understanding of what we call the topic-focus articulation (TFA) of the sentence as reflecting, in an anthropocentric way, the impact of communication on the structure of natural language. We share the view of Halliday and others according to which this layer belongs to the basic hierarchies in the sentence structure. As illustrated in Section 3.2, TFA is expressed by grammatical means and is semantically relevant, so that it should be described within grammar. This is perfectly possible with dependency syntax, but runs into serious difficulties in phrase structure based descriptions, in which either topic or focus often has a shape other than a single constituent of whichever level.3 2.3. Valency as the core of syntax If dependency is understood as a fundamental relation, then the syntactic properties of a lexical unit can be described on the basis of its possible complementations, including restrictions on their combinations, their relationships to the surface (morphemic) shape of sentences, and so on. The syntactic valency of a word, characterized from this viewpoint, is usually specified in the form of the valency frame, in which the (optional and obligatory) complementations of a head are listed and described with (99)
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respect to their combinatory properties, their appearance as (possible or compulsory) controllers, restrictions on their movement, their deletability, and so on. In a valency based description not only complementations determined (subcategorized) by individual heads in the sense of configurationality or in a similar way (arguments) can be handled systematically, but also the whole classes of free complementations (adjuncts, especially adverbials). Such a description (in our approach, this is the ‘tectogrammatical’ sentence structure, which in most of the main points comes close to ‘lexicogrammar’, characterized as ‘functional’ e.g. by Halliday and Fawcett 1987:7) allows for a great deal of grammatical information to be included in lexical entries and for a specification of the representations of sentences by means of an economical mechanism, based on a few general and natural principles (see Section 5). The orientation of the dependency relation can be specified on the basis of an operational criterion, viz. of one of the members being syntactically omissible, if not in a lexically specified pair of words (as is the case with the endocentric syntagms), then at the level of word classes ((…, cf. P. Sgall’s paper “Revisiting the classification of the dependents” in this volume)). Other questions open to discussion are difficult for every kind of syntactic description, cf. for instance the boundary line between so-called equi- and raising-verbs in English; such issues have to be discussed as concerning individual languages, having in mind the specific relationships between their underlying structures and the outer shape of their sentences. Function words are not connected with similar problems, since in the syntactic structure of the sentence they do not occupy specific positions. Articles and prepositions are always connected with nouns, auxiliary verbs and conjunctions with verbs, and they cannot be freely complemented. Thus it appears not to be appropriate to assign them the same status that autosemantic lexical units have. Their counterparts in the (underlying) syntactic representations are more adequately handled as parts of complex symbols (node labels), i.e. as indices of lexical symbols themselves, which denote the values of categories such as definiteness, number, tense, modality, and the syntactic relations, be they expressed by morphs (endings, affixes, function words), alternations, or by word order. (100)
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