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 | pp. xvii–xxvii

Translators’ Introduction

Sylvain Kahane and Timothy Osborne | pp. xxix–lxxiii

Foreword | p. lxxv

Preface to the first original edition | pp. lxxvii–lxxxi

Preface to the second original edition | pp. lxxxi–lxxxii

Part 1. The connection

Preamble | pp. 3–96

Structure of the simple sentence | pp. 97–189

Question and negation | pp. 191–237

Valency | pp. 239–284

Metataxis | pp. 285–323

Part 2. Junction

| pp. 325–362

Part 3. Transfer

Introduction | pp. 365–413

First-degree transfer, simple transfer | pp. 415–481

First-degree transfer, multiple transfer | pp. 483–550

Second degree transfer, simple transfer | pp. 551–632

Second-degree transfer, multiple transfer | pp. 633–644

Applications | pp. 645–680

Index of terms | pp. 681–690

Index of languages | pp. 691–693

Index of linguists | pp. 695–696

Index of citations | pp. 697–698

Cited by

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2019. Dependency Grammar. Annual Review of Linguistics 5:1 ► pp. 197 ff.

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2017. Structural priming supports grammatical networks. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40

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2016. Drawing Syntax before Syntactic Trees. Historiographia Linguistica 43:3 ► pp. 301 ff.

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Neveu, Franck

2021. Review of Imrényi & Mazziotta (2020): Chapters of Dependency Grammar. A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière. Historiographia Linguistica

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2022. Effects of Syntactic Distance and Word Order on Language Processing: An Investigation Based on a Psycholinguistic Treebank of English. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

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