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Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta
[Studies in Language Companion Series 212] 2020
► pp. 215–252

Chapter 7
Some aspects of dependency in Otto Jespersen’s structural syntax

| University of Copenhagen, NorS

This paper aims to challenge the assumption according to which Otto Jespersen’s syntactic model represents an anticipation of the immediate constituent analysis. In our opinion, there are elements that rather align with a more dependency-oriented framework, as it is the case of Jespersen’s notorious theory of three ranks (1913, 1921, 1937). This was developed over more than twenty years and was meant to constitute the necessary presupposition (and thus the theoretical base) for the very distinction between junction and nexus, grounding it on a pure functional base. Albeit not always consistently or exhaustively fleshed out, the theory of three ranks represents one of Jespersen’s most interesting ideas. The model will be described in detail, focusing on the latest and more formalized version given in Analytic Syntax (1937), by discussing the notation adopted and checking if it fits the five basic requirements for a dependency-based model, as per Mazziotta & Kahane (2017). Finally, it will be shown how Jespersen’s model was taken over by Louis Hjelmslev (1928), in order to develop a purely relations-oriented morphosyntactic theory.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Basic structures
    • 2.1Nexus and junction
    • 2.2The functional model of ranks
      • 2.2.1Objects
      • 2.2.2Predicatives
      • 2.2.3Verbs: Life-givers or trouble-makers?
  • 3.Jespersen’s notation
    • 3.1Connection-basedness
    • 3.2Binarity
    • 3.3Headedness
    • 3.4Node-to-word mapping
    • 3.5Flatness
  • 4.A case of critical reinterpretation
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.08cig
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Cited by 1 other publications

Imrényi, András & Zsuzsa Vladár
2020. Chapter 5. Sámuel Brassai in the history of dependency grammar. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 164 ff. DOI logo

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