7 - Syntax
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Dependencies and phrases
Summary of Section 3.2:
• Properties that can't be defined in terms of percepts, emotions or motor skills are conceptual properties, which consist of links from one concept to another.
• The links are not mere ‘associations’ but relations which belong to different types.
• Some links belong to a small number of primitive relation types; these include isA, argument and value, and quantity.
• Non-primitive relations are themselves concepts, called relational concepts (in contrast with the familiar entity concepts). A relational concept has an argument and a value, and belongs to a taxonomy of such concepts.
• A concept's quantity says how many exemplars are expected.
• Relational concepts, just like entity concepts, can multiply freely according to experience, so (unlike most other theories) Word Grammar does not limit relations to a small vocabulary of supposedly universal relations.
• One way of creating a new relational concept is to define it in terms of existing relations.
• Some such definitions contain a relational triangle in which one relation is defined in terms of two others.
• Others allow recursion so that they may apply to their own output.
The area of language most obviously relevant to the theory of cognitive relations which I presented in Section 3.2 is syntax, which is all about how words in a sentence are related to one another. Some of the most widely recognized terms in syntax are the names of relations: ‘subject’, ‘object’, ‘modifier’, ‘complement’, ‘dependent’, in contrast with the names for entity concepts such as ‘noun’, ‘past’ or ‘interrogative’.
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- An Introduction to Word Grammar , pp. 145 - 192Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010