Theoretical Grammar

Textlinguistics studies the text as a syntactic unit, its main features and peculiarities, different ways of its analysis.
Discourse analysis focuses on the study of language use with reference to the social and psychological factors that influence communication.


3. Basic syntactic notions.

The syntactic language level can be described with the help of special linguistic terms and notions: syntactic unit, syntactic form, syntactic meaning, syntactic function, syntactic position, and syntactic relations.

Syntactic unit is always a combination that has at least two constituents. The basic syntactic units are a word-group, a clause, a sentence, and a text. Their main features are:

1. 
   they are hierarchical units – the units of a lower level serve the building material for the units of a higher level;
   
2. 
   as all language units the syntactic units are of two-fold nature:
   

content side syntactic meaning
Syntactic unit = =
expression side syntactic form
c) they are of communicative and non-communicative nature – word-groups
and clauses are of non-communicative nature while sentences and texts
are of communicative nature.
Syntactic meaning is the way in which separate word meanings are combined to produce meaningful word-groups and sentences.
Green ideas sleep furiously. This sentence is quite correct grammatically. However it makes no sense as it lacks syntactic meaning.
Syntactic form may be described as the distributional formula of the unit (pattern). John hits the ball – N1 + V + N2.
Syntactic function is the function of a unit on the basis of which it is included to a larger unit: in the word-group a smart student the word ‘smart’ is in subordinate attributive relations to the head element. In traditional terms it is used to denote syntactic function of a unit within the sentence (subject, predicate, etc.).