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Elements of Structural Syntax
e-Book – Open Access 
ISBN 9789027269997
This volume appears now finally in English, sixty years after the death of its author, Lucien Tesnière. It has been translated from the French original into German, Spanish, Italian, and Russian, and now at long last into English as well. The volume contains a comprehensive approach to the syntax of natural languages, an approach that is foundational for an entire stream in the modern study of syntax and grammar. This stream is known today as dependency grammar (DG). Drawing examples from dozens of languages, many of which he was proficient in, Tesnière presents insightful analyses of numerous phenomena of syntax. Among the highlights are the concepts of valency and head-initial vs. head-final languages. These concepts are now taken for granted by most modern theories of syntax, even by phrase structure grammars, which represent, in a sense, the opposite sort of approach to syntax from what Tesnière was advocating.
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[Not in series, 185] 2015. lxxxii, 698 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 6 March 2015
Published online on 6 March 2015
© John Benjamins
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Table of Contents
- List of stemmas | pp. xvii–xxvii
- Translators’ IntroductionSylvain Kahane and Timothy Osborne | pp. xxix–lxxiii
- Foreword | pp. lxxv–75
- Preface to the first original edition | pp. lxxvii–lxxxi
- Preface to the second original edition | pp. lxxxi–lxxxii
- Part 1. The connection
- Preamble | pp. 3–96
- Structure of the simple sentence | pp. 97–189
- Question and negation | pp. 191–237
- Valency | pp. 239–284
- Metataxis | pp. 285–323
- Part 2. Junction
- | pp. 325–362
- Part 3. Transfer
- Introduction | pp. 365–413
- First-degree transfer, simple transfer | pp. 415–481
- First-degree transfer, multiple transfer | pp. 483–550
- Second degree transfer, simple transfer | pp. 551–632
- Second-degree transfer, multiple transfer | pp. 633–644
- Applications | pp. 645–680
- Index of terms | pp. 681–690
- Index of languages | pp. 691–693
- Index of linguists | pp. 695–696
- Index of citations | pp. 697–698
Cited by (83)
Cited by 83 other publications
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Chen, Xinying & Miroslav Kubát
2025. Distribution of dependency tags in different text types in Czech. In Mathematical Modelling in Linguistics and Text Analysis [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 370], ► pp. 90 ff.
Dai, Zheyuan & Jianwei Yan
2025. Discourse markers’ role in syntactic complexity of sentence structure. In Mathematical Modelling in Linguistics and Text Analysis [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 370], ► pp. 104 ff.
Hudson, Richard, Nikolas Gisborne, Thomas Hikaru Clark, Eva Duran Eppler, Willem Hollmann, Andrew Rosta & Graeme Trousdale
Imrényi, András
Losardo, Luca
Nie, Pengyuan, Mengxuan Lin, Jinzhong Ning, Zhihao Yang & Lei Wang
Nordström, Jackie
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Olga A. Solopova & Natalia N. Koshkarova
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Zhou, Yikai, Jingyang Jiang & Haitao Liu
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Dai, Zheyuan, Haitao Liu & Jianwei Yan
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Kubát, Miroslav, Ján Mačutek, Radek Čech & Michaela Nogolová
Shen, Mengfei & Ruochen Niu
Steimann, Friedrich & Robin Stunic
Zhou, Yikai
Özenç, Berke & Ercan Solak
Dai, Zheyuan & Haitao Liu
Ivanova, Svetlana V. & Svetlana N. Medvedeva
Lacková, Ľudmila
Lacková, Ľudmila
Li, Taoyuan, Liangli Ma, Jiwei Qin & Wei Ren
Osborne, Timothy & Jiaxin Li
Фещенко, В.В.
BİLGİN AKSOY, Gökçen
BİLGİN AKSOY, Gökçen
Duran, Magali, Maria das Graças Volpe Nunes, Lucelene Lopes & Thiago Alexandre Salgueiro Pardo
Hahn, Michael & Yang Xu
Ibáñez Orellana, Romualdo, Juan Zamora Osorio, Mariela Cisnero Correa & Solange Aguirre Rozas
Martín Arista, Javier
Niu, Ruochen & Haitao Liu
Ryabchenko, Natal'ya & Ol'ga Malysheva
SAĞLAM, Bilgit & Ahmet BURAN
Solovyev, Valery Dmitrievich, Marina Ivanovna Solnyshkina & Danielle S. McNamara
Yan, Jianwei & Haitao Liu
Arfé, Barbara, Federica Festa, Lucia Ronconi & Gaia Spicciarelli
Huang, Yan, Akira Murakami, Theodora Alexopoulou & Anna Korhonen
2021. Subcategorization frame identification for learner English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 26:2 ► pp. 187 ff.
Lopopolo, Alessandro, Antal van den Bosch, Karl-Magnus Petersson & Roel M. Willems
Neveu, Franck
2021. Review of Imrényi & Mazziotta (2020): Chapters of Dependency Grammar. A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière. Historiographia Linguistica 48:2-3 ► pp. 316 ff.
Steiner, Petra
2021. Linking the dependents. In Language and Text [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 356], ► pp. 93 ff.
Yih, Tsy
Zhou, Chenliang
George, Elizabeth Jasmi
Gobbo, Federico, Marco Benini, Jean H.M. Wagemans, Pierpaolo Dondio, Luca Longo & Stefano Bistarelli
Imrényi, András & Zsuzsa Vladár
2020. Sámuel Brassai in the history of dependency grammar. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 163 ff.
Novakova, Iva, Dirk Siepmann & Marion Gymnich
Przepiórkowski, Adam & Agnieszka Patejuk
Sériot, Patrick
2020. The Russian trail. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 253 ff.
Wang, Yalan
de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine & Joakim Nivre
Gao, Jun & Haitao Liu
Neuman, Yair
Neuman, Yair
Neuman, Yair
Osborne, Timothy
Osborne, Timothy
2020. Franz Kern. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 189 ff.
Böhm, Roger
2018. Just for the record. In Substance-based Grammar – The (Ongoing) Work of John Anderson [Studies in Language Companion Series, 204], ► pp. 261 ff.
Sass, Bálint
Abraham, Werner & Elisabeth Leiss
2017. Multiple case binding – The principled underspecification of case exponency. In Contrastive Studies in Verbal Valency [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 237], ► pp. 28 ff.
Gobbo, Federico
Hudson, Richard
Langenbakh, Margaryta
Przepiórkowski, Adam
Przepiórkowski, Adam
2018. The origin of the valency metaphor in linguistics. Lingvisticae Investigationes 41:1 ► pp. 152 ff.
Jastrząb, Tomasz, Grzegorz Kwiatkowski & Paweł Sadowski
Mazziotta, Nicolas
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
[no author supplied]
2021. Theory and models. In Language and Text [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 356], ► pp. 7 ff.
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