"The semantic basis of syntactic analysis" (Nguyen Van Hiep)

Associate Professor Dr. Nguyen Van Hiep is currently a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities - Vietnam National University, Hanoi). This book is the result of specialized lectures on semantics and grammar that he has presented at the postgraduate and doctoral levels over the past ten years. On the occasion of the publication of this new work (Education Publishing House, May 2008), we would like to excerpt and introduce it.Prefaceof the book.

Excerpt from the preface of "Fundamentals of Syntactic Semantics"

As the title suggests, this book aims to explore and establish the semantic foundations for syntactic analysis.

From being disregarded and considered unreliable within formal grammatical movements, meaning is now a particularly emphasized factor, especially with the strong development of functional and cognitive grammar. In grammatical research, meaning must be discussed; semantic grammar must be considered.

However, meaning is a highly abstract and elusive concept. It's not easy to answer the question: "What kinds of meanings can a sentence convey?"

Based on the assumption that everything expressed in a sentence carries meaning, this book attempts to analyze the layers of meaning that can be conveyed in spoken sentences. The remarkable development of semantics in recent times has given us reliable grounds for discussing these layers of meaning. With the notion that syntax is not autonomous, but rather serves to convey meaning, we believe that uncovering the layers of meaning expressed in a sentence will simultaneously establish a semantic basis for syntactic analysis. These layers of meaning, in our view, include descriptive meaning, modal meaning, thematic meaning, and utterance purpose meaning.

Based on the semantic foundations established above, we propose a new approach to describing the syntactic structure of Vietnamese sentences.

Our approach is to start from the types of meanings that can be expressed in a sentence that shape the corresponding formal categories. This is a radical function-to-form approach, succinctly expressed by the Belgian linguist Jan Nuyts as follows: "taking the semantic category as its starting point, it looks into the range of its linguistic manifestation" [Nuyts 2001].

This approach is still quite new to researchers of Vietnamese grammar. However, in our opinion, it is a promising direction, as we have had ample experience with the endless debates over the past few decades in trying to use formal criteria to determine the syntactic components of Vietnamese sentences, a monosyllabic language with no morphological changes. Starting from the types of meaning that can be expressed in a sentence, considering them as the semantic basis for describing the syntactic structure of a Vietnamese sentence, we advocate a simple sentence analysis approach, based on our cognitive experiences of the world and how we organize and present those experiences. This approach leads us to the conclusion that a sentence is a multi-dimensional entity, and the linear structural components of a sentence are not homogeneous in their function of reflecting information belonging to those different dimensions. Consequently, if we abandon the linear view in favor of a "three-dimensional" perspective on sentences, we must arrive at a modular analysis of their structural components.

This book is aimed at readers who are undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students specializing in linguistics in particular and literature in general. It is also essential for those engaged in research and teaching of literature, because studying literary works means studying the message they convey to the reader, and the smallest unit capable of conveying that information is the sentence. From a certain perspective, mastering the semantic content of sentences will be the basis for exploring the message of the broader text. We hope that this book will provide reliable and up-to-date semantic knowledge, helping to address the persistent challenges in analyzing and describing the syntactic structure of Vietnamese sentences.

In this book, when citing, in most cases we note three parameters: author's name, year of publication, and page number. All information related to the cited work will be presented in detail in the "References" section, arranged by author's last name. Sections will be numbered according to the chapter number, with distinctions between subsections; for example, if you encounter section 5.3.2, you will know that this section is in Chapter 5, the second subsection (i.e., after 5.3.1) of the larger section 5.2.

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