Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
18 'Doing syntax': aims and methodologies
Meaningful Arrangement - Exploring the Syntactic Description of Texts - Edward McDonald
Edward McDonald [+]
University of Auckland.
Description
In this final chapter the author takes Firth’s advice on the necessity of what he called ‘renewal of connection’ (Firth 1957 / 1968: 175–6) between theory and data, to complete the circle that has taken us from data through description to theorising, by presenting a specific case study of one attempt to apply a particular theory – systemic functional linguistics – to the description of a particular language – Mandarin Chinese. As the author noted in the Briefing, syntactic analysis is not just about theories, it is about languages, and an exploration of the difficulties and contingencies of a concrete attempt to account for syntactic patterning in one language, an attempt that also involves mediating between two very different linguistic traditions, should drive home the essential relationship between theories and languages.