Huomautuksia teoreettisen syntaksin käytäntöön

• Tapani Kelomäki

Avainsanat: syntaksi, yliopisto-opetus

Abstrakti

The theoretical basis of syntax (englanti)

1/1999 (103)

Tapani Kelomki (University of Helsinki, Department of Finnish; [e-mail])

THE THEORETICAL BASIS OF SYNTAX

Syntax is being shaken up: on the one hand, different kinds of divergent theories are being formulated, and on the other, the sphere of research is now encompassing the spoken language and pragmatic phenomena. Tensions exist between the different viewpoints: for example, there is no clear agreement on what should form the basis for syntax teaching in schools, or on how syntax research will progress or whether it is just a case of new terms to represent old concepts. Moreover, the starting points and the aims of research are rooted in different approaches. Students often feel syntax is difficult and unconnected.

'Low-level' syntactic phenomena such as congruence, word order and government are in accordance with most people's intuition and can be learnt. But otherwise, below the surface there are genuine differences in content and in sociological aspects. Descriptive problems concern, for example, the headword and many different phrase structures, not to mention infinitival constructions. Whose intuition or which theoretical starting points or aims should be used in approaching the phenomenon (students' intuitions are very often seen as "incorrect")? How are sentence constituency and phrase structure presented in, for example, school grammar books or Fennistic research, and how should they be presented? What is the relationship between theoretical premises, descriptive language and intuition, and how explicit should descriptions be? What is theoretical and non-theoretical in linguistic research, comparing, for example, wave theory, speech act theory and generative theory? What is the status of empirical research, and what is explanation in syntax?

The article criticises certain views and calls for a discussion of the principles underlying the issues and for better explication of theories, so that conflicts between aims and starting points and with descriptive practice can be reduced.