Saussure’s Course of general linguistics published in 1916 has become the basis for a number of other syntactic theories, besides descriptive lin­guistics and glossematics. These theories cannot be grouped into a particu­lar school, since they represent independent syntactic systems. However, they share similar views on the subject and tasks of syntactic research, based on Saussure’s […]

The term syntax, originating from the Greek words syn, meaning “co-” or “together”, and taxis, meaning “sequence, order, arrangement”, is the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words are arranged to show connections of meaning within a sentence. It concerns how different words (which, going back to Dionysius Thrax, are categorized into […]

Verbal Category of Voice Although a number of criteria to differentiate between a simple predicate expressed by a verb in Passive and a compound nominal predicate have been put forward, yet this question is disputable. The identical form and absence of precise distinction of categorical meaning (passive meaning as an action performed on the subject […]

Worthy of note, however, are utterances where the meaning of the past tense stands in contrast with the meaning of some adverbial phrase refer­ring the event to the present moment: Today again I spoke to Mr Jones. The seeming linguistic paradox of such cases consists in the fact that their two types of time indication, […]

Since the late 1960s a number of theories have been put forward claim­ing that the semantic relationships borne by nominal parts of speech to verbs make up a small, universal set. Since obviously there is a great deal of vari­ation between languages as to how many cases they have, the semantic rela­tionships that are posited […]

Methodology and Linguistics Learning to speak a foreign language is acquiring the ability to express oneself in different sounds and words through the use of a different grammar. Some sounds, words as items of grammar may or may not have counterparts in the native language and these may have meanings or content which are similar […]