Background Notes on Syntactic Arrangement
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9866417 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rodger A Farley (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1958 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 318 |
| Publication date | 1958-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Hispania (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2133 • E-ISSN: 2153-6414 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/334816 |
| OpenAlex | W2319198121 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
Jespersen was cognizant of a lack of research on the subject word-order when he referred to the latter as the Cinderella of linguistic science.' In the field of Spanish, Rodolfo Lenz was probably the first to call our attention to a lacuna in this aspect of syntax: El orden de las palabras en la oraci6n castellana es un asunto todavia poco estudiado; la mayor parte de las gramiticas no dicen nada al respecto.2 Even Bello's grammar is almost silent on this matter. In his very brief chapter XXII, Estructura de la oracidn, he speaks of sentence elements and affirms that syntax concerns el orden y dependencia en que los colocamos . . .. Then after he asserts that the subject is the dominant word in the sentence, he adds Y en torno al sustantivo sujeto o al verbo se colocan todas las otras palabras. . . .4 This is Bello's only contribution, as far as the writer knows, to the clarification of the phenomenon of syntactic order. Grammars of Spanish, in general, may be categorized into two types, at least with regard to statements concerning syntactic order. Ramsey's grammar and that of the Real Academia are of the first type. These two serve as models, and the latter, especially, as an authority. Their treatment of word placement, while comparatively ample, appears to be based on general observations and a limited sampling, rather than on great masses of examples drawn from the language-in-action. The second type contributes nothing new in the way of descriptions; it is more or less a mimic of the authority. Statements on word-order, in this kind of grammar, often are very categorical.5 The unscientific approach of both types of grammars, to the phenomenon of syntactic arrangement, can hardly be expected to provide descriptions which accurately reflect the speech patterns of natives
Linguistics · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · History · Philosophy · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies
| Highly cited | No |
|---|