Syntax; Diagram; Dependency; Constituency; English grammar; History of linguistics
Résumé :
[en] This contribution investigates the syntactic conceptions of, and the diagramming system introduced by, the American grammarian Stephen Watkins Clark (1847), who introduced the first comprehensive syntactic diagramming system. The structure of the English sentence is illustrated by agglutinated “bubbles” expressing the relations between words by the means of their relative position. The sentence consists of two or three horizontally aligned bubbles containing words that are called principal elements. These principal elements can be complemented with adjunct elements, that appear in bubbles attached below them. For grammatical words the conventions differ depending on whether the grammatical word is a preposition or a conjunction. Coordination is never named as such, but there is an orthogonal abstract relation that connects elements performing the same role in a “compound” construction. The system allows recursiveness in two different ways: by wrapping bubbles into other bubbles, thus following a mereological logic (part- whole relations) close to IC analysis or by hierarchically aggregating bubbles that resemble dependency trees. Clark's conceptions thus prefigure modern graphical formalizations. [fr] Cet article traite des diagrammes et des conceptions syntaxiques du grammairien américain
Stephen Watkins Clark (1847), qui fut le premier à proposer un système complet de diagrammes
syntaxiques. La structure de la phrase anglaise est représentée sous la forme de “bulles” qui sont agrégées les unes aux autres. Les relations syntaxiques entre les mots sont ainsi exprimées au moyen du positionnement relatif de ces bulles. Ainsi, la phrase consiste en un agencement horizontal de deux ou trois bulles qui contiennent les mots que Clark appelle éléments principaux”(principal elements). Ces éléments peuvent être complétés à l'aide d'élément dits “adjoints” (adjuncts), qui sont représentés par des bulles attachées sous les éléments principaux. En ce qui concerne les mots grammaticaux, les conventions sont différentes suivant qu'il s'agit de prépositions ou de conjonctions. Même si le terme n'apparaît jamais, la notion de coordination est représentée par les constructions “composées” (compound), qui reposent sur l'existence d'une relation orthogonale associant les bulles des éléments principaux verticalement et celles des éléments adjoints horizontalement. Le système permet la récursivité de deux manières: (i) en incluant certaines bulles dans de plus larges bulles, suivant une logique méréologique proche de l'ACI (relations partie-tout); (ii) en assemblant hiérarchiquement les bulles d'une manière qui ressemble à un arbre de dépendance. De ce fait, les conceptions de Clark préfigurent les formalisations graphiques modernes.
Disciplines :
Langues & linguistique
Auteur, co-auteur :
Mazziotta, Nicolas ; Université de Liège > Département de langues et littératures romanes > Linguistique synchronique du français
Langue du document :
Anglais
Titre :
Drawing Syntax before Syntactic Trees: Stephen Watkins Clark's Sentence Diagrams (1847)
Date de publication/diffusion :
2016
Titre du périodique :
Historiographia Linguistica
ISSN :
0302-5160
eISSN :
1569-9781
Maison d'édition :
John Benjamins Publishing Co., Amsterdam, Pays-Bas
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