Oberflächengrammatischer Wald : Syntaktische Baumschule am Beispiel eines authentischen Textes

Abstract

When analysing a sentence, you are revealing your understanding of this sentence by certain criteria. Before analysing a sentence, you need to understand it in a basic, pre-analytical, concealed way: Analysis is not possible without understanding. The process of analysing a sentence will concretize and finalize this understanding. You will need a theoretical background, the theoretical “tools” when uncovering your syntactical understanding of a sentence by means of syntactical analysis: Analysis is not possible without these theoretical tools. The tools used in the theoretical framework of surface grammar (Oberflachengrammatik) as they were first elaborated by Eisenberg in his 1986 grammar book include syntactic constituents such as verb, noun, noun group and the like (syntactic forms), and syntactic relations, such as predicate, subject, object and the like (syntactic functions). While this sounds like a rather traditional view of grammar, the thorough analyses presented here show that there is more to surface grammar than one might expect. The prime goal of this publication is to present the results of different sentence analyses in form of syntactical trees with information about the forms and functions of the syntactic constituents used. You will find more than 100 syntactical trees, forming a “syntactical forest”. It gives students (and other readers) who are analysing sentences in the framework of surface grammar an opportunity to test their knowledge and understanding of certain syntactical phenomena against the background of authentic use of speech. Besides, the “Surface Grammar in action” is proof of the soundness of the analytical methods and tools used by appropriately analysing linguistic phenomena found in the wilderness of journalistic text production. And yet, sometimes there is more than one solution, more than just one way to explain the structures found. Most authors decide which road to take by themselves. We include the crossways by adding our dialogues about arguable cases, so that readers may see several options of how to explain the more difficult (and more interesting) aspects of grammar. The present publication appears in the year of Peter Eisenberg’s 80th birthday and is dedicated to him with the deepest respect for his life work and especially for the foundation of a syntactic framework with which so many generations of university students are working and which has helped so many understand the intriguing features of the grammar of the German language.