DEPENDENCY SYNTAX IN A FORMAL DESCRIPTION

Necessary condition: to combine requirements of formal methodology with empirical findings of classical research. Prototypical expression of grammatical values - morphemes (endings, affixes, function words); word order (with intonation) expresses first of all the topic-focus articulation, also in English. 'Free' word order corroborates the use of dependency syntax, present in other frameworks - Lexical Functional Grammar, Head Driven Phrase Structure, X-bar theory, theta roles: dependency is necessary, constituency perhaps is not. Interactive nature of language - topic-focus articulation (TFA) as an aspect of sentence structure. Classical postulates of synchronic linguistics: (A) to distinguish language as a system (i) from its use in communication (langue vs. parole, linguistic competence vs. performance); communicative (pragmatic) competence; (ii) from cognitive patternings of content; (B) to acknowledge the word as a basic unit (to store much of grammatical information in the lexicon) and sentence as the largest complex unit of the system of language; (C) to establish (underlying) syntax as the core of linguistic description ('Cartesian Linguistics').