Elements of Structural Syntax

Author

Lucien Tesnière

Translator

Timothy Osborne

| Zhejiang University

Sylvain Kahane

| Université Paris Ouest Nanterre

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027212122 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00

e-Book – Open Access Download from our e-platform

ISBN 9789027269997

This volume appears now finally in English, sixty years after the death of its author, Lucien Tesnière. It has been translated from the French original into German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and now at long last into English as well. The volume contains a comprehensive approach to the syntax of natural languages, an approach that is foundational for an entire stream in the modern study of syntax and grammar. This stream is known today as dependency grammar (DG). Drawing examples from dozens of languages, many of which he was proficient in, Tesnière presents insightful analyses of numerous phenomena of syntax. Among the highlights are the concepts of valency and head-initial vs. head-final languages. These concepts are now taken for granted by most modern theories of syntax, even by phrase structure grammars, which represent, in a sense, the opposite sort of approach to syntax from what Tesnière was advocating.

As of February 2018, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.

[Not in series, 185] 2015. lxxxii, 698 pp.

Publishing status: Available

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

https://doi.org/10.1075/z.185

Table of Contents

List of stemmas	xvii–xxvii
Translators’ Introduction Sylvain Kahane and Timothy Osborne	xxix–lxxiii
Foreword	lxxv
Preface to the first original edition	lxxvii–lxxxi
Preface to the second original edition	lxxxi–lxxxii
Part 1. The connection
Preamble	3–96
Structure of the simple sentence	97–189
Question and negation	191–237
Valency	239–284
Metataxis	285–323
Part 2. Junction
	325–362
Part 3. Transfer
Introduction	365–413
First-degree transfer, simple transfer	415–481
First-degree transfer, multiple transfer	483–550
Second degree transfer, simple transfer	551–632
Second-degree transfer, multiple transfer	633–644
Applications	645–680
Index of terms	681–690
Index of languages	691–693
Index of linguists	695–696
Index of citations	697–698

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