The structural approach: an approach to grammar based on Saussure’s ideas of language, studying the interrelationships between words.
(1)Language is a system of signs, each of which consists of two parts: signified (所指)(concept) and signifier (能指)(linguistic expression, phonological and morphological representation). The relation between the two is arbitrary.
(2) A sentence does not only have a linear直线的 structure, consisting of individual words one after another in a line; they also have a hierarchical 按等级划分的structure, made up of layers of word groups. The words in a sentence are not of the same degree of closeness to each other.

The syntagmatic /structural/horizontal /chain relation 组合关系refers to the relation between one item and others in a sequence, or between elements which are all present.

The paradigmatic /systematic/vertical /choice relation 聚合关系refers to the relation holding between elements replaceable with each other at a particular place in a structure, or between one element present and the others absent.

Construction(结构): any syntactic string of words ranging from sentences over phrasal structures to certain complex lexemes
An exocentric construction(外向结构) is a construction that does not contain any head element that is capable of being a syntactically adequate substitution for the whole construction.
Exocentric compound: breakneck
An endocentric construction (内向结构)/a headed construction is one that contains a head element that is capable of being a syntactically adequate substitution for the whole construction.
subordinate constructions(从属结构): constructions with one dominating head and other dependent constituents
coordinate constructions(并列结构): constructions with more than one head functionally equivalent to each other

Constituent(成分): any linguistic form or group of linguistic forms in a construction.
A construction is made up of constituents which can be constructions themselves.
Immediate constituents(直接成分): constituents immediately, directly, below the level of a construction, which may be a sentence or a word group.
How to get immediate constituents? The criterion is substitutability—whether a sequence of words can be substituted by a single word and the structure remains the same.
Ultimate constituent (最终成分): the smallest grammatical unit obtained through segmentation.

IC analysis (直接成分分析法): the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents—word groups (or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents (morphemes) are reached.

Syntax 句法refers to the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language or simply, the study of the formation of sentences.

Approaches to the study of sentences
The traditional approach
The structural approach
The generative approach
The functional approach

The traditional approach takes a sentence as a sequence of words. It studies sentence formation by studying words in terms of categories and their interrelationships.
Category(范畴): the defining properties of units like nouns and verbs.

Number: a category of the noun and pronoun.
In English, there are usually two terms of number: singular and plural.

Gender: a category of the noun and pronoun.
In English, the gender distinctions are on the whole natural, determined by the biological gender of the creature,

Case: the formal markers that tell you how a noun or a pronoun is to be constructed in relationship to other words in the sentence.?
Case is prominent in the grammar of Latin with six distinctions of nominative(主格), accusative(宾格), genitive(所有格), dative(与格), vocative(呼格), and ablative(离格).

Tense: A verb form that indicates, or can indicate, a relationship between the time the action in a verb occurs and the time the verb is uttered.
English used to be said to have sixteen tenses.
Now in English two tenses, present and past, are recognized.

Aspect: a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state (in a given situation).
There are two aspects in English, perfect (perfective)完成时 and progressive (continuous)进行时. The former refers to the completion of an action while the latter refers to duration without a completion.
Perfect: He has left. He read a book.
Continuous: He is reading a book.

Concord/agreement (一致): the requirement that the forms of two or more words in a syntactic relationship should agree with each other in terms of some categories.

Government (支配): the control over the form of some words by other words in certain syntactic constructions. It is a relationship in which a word of a certain class determines the form of others in terms of certain category.

3，By the generative approach

we mean the particular type of linguistic theory originated with the American linguist Noam Chomsky. It is mainly referred to transformational-generative grammar (TG) proposed by Noam Chomsky.

Two requirements for a good grammar
1) Observational adequacy(观察分析性): a good grammar must account for all and only the permitted sentences of a language. It will be no good if it excludes a number of well-formed sentences, or if it includes ill-formed ones.
2) Descriptive adequacy(描写充分性): a grammar can only choose models of sentences that coincide with the intuition of native speakers concerning their language.

Chomsky proposes that the grammars of all human languages share a common framework, which he calls a transformational generative grammar(转换生成语法).

The surface structure is that of the sentence as it is pronounced or written.
The deep structure contains all the units and relationships that are necessary for interpreting the meaning of the sentence.

4，The functional approach(3-1)
Theme(主位): something known or at least obvious in a given situation and from which the speaker proceeds.
Rheme(述位): what the speaker states about, or in regard to, the starting point of the utterance
My supervisor gave me this book.
The order of theme and rheme is determined by the speaker’s idea of their function. A kind of analysis of sentence in terms of theme and rheme is called functional sentence perspective/ functional approach.

The theme-rheme order is the usual one in unemotional narration, thus called the objective order.
The rheme-theme order is usually in emotional narration, thus called the subjective order.

Communicative dynamism(交际性动力): the extent to which the sentence element contributes to the development of the communication.
Theme constitutes the lowest of CD within the sentence while rheme contributes the highest.

Extension of Sentences(4-1
Recursiveness循环 refers to extension of sentences by such means as coordination and subordination, conjoining and embedding, hypotactic and paratactic.
Coordination 协调refers to the linguistic phenomenon that two or more categories of the same type are grouped together with the help of a conjunction such as and, but and or.
Subordination 次等refers to the process or result of linking linguistic units so that they have different syntactic status, one being dependent upon the other and usually a constituent of the other.
Conjoining 交接refers to the process one clause is coordinated or conjoined with another.
Embedding 嵌入refers to the means by which one clause is included in the sentence (main clause) in syntactic subordination.

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