INTRODUCTORY NOTE
[*] 268.
The study of formal grammar arose at a late period in the history of
language, and dealt with language as a fully developed product. Accordingly
the terms of Syntax correspond to the logical habits of thought and forms of
expression that had grown up at such a period, and have a
logical as well as a merely
grammatical
meaning. But a developed syntactical structure is not essential to the
expression of thought. A form of words—like
ō
puerum pulchrum!
oh! beautiful boy—expresses a thought and
might even be called a sentence; though it does not logically declare
anything, and does not, strictly speaking, make what is usually called a
sentence at all.
At a very early period of spoken language, word-forms were no doubt
significant in themselves, without inflections, and constituted the whole of
language,—just as to a child the name of some familiar object will
stand for all he can say about it. At a somewhat later stage, such
uninflected words put side by side made a rudimentary form of proposition:
as a child might say
fire bright; horse run. With
this began the first form of logical distinction, that of Subject and
Predicate; but as yet there was no distinction in form between noun and
verb, and no fixed distinction in function. At a later stage forms were
differentiated in function and—by various processes of composition
which cannot be fully traced—Inflections were developed. These
served to express
person,
tense,
case, and other grammatical relations, and we have true
Parts of Speech.
Not until language reached this last stage was there any fixed limit to the
association of words, or any rule prescribing the manner in which they
should be combined. But gradually, by usage, particular forms came to be
limited to special functions (as nouns, verbs, adjectives), and fixed
customs arose of combining words into what we now call Sentences. These
customs are in part the result of general laws or modes of thought (logic),
resulting from our habits of mind (
General Grammar); and in
part are what may be called By-Laws, established by custom in a given
language (
Particular Grammar), and making what is called the
Syntax of that language.
In the fully developed methods of expression to which we are almost
exclusively accustomed, the unit of expression is the
Sentence: that is, the completed statement, with its distinct
Subject and Predicate. Originally sentences were simple. But two simple
sentence-forms may be used together, without the grammatical subordination
of either, to express a more complex form of thought than could be denoted
by one alone. This is
parataxis (arrangement side
by side). Since, however, the two sentences, independent in form, were in
fact used to express parts of a complex whole and were therefore mutually
dependent, the sense of unity found expression in conjunctions, which
denoted the grammatical subordination of the one to the other. This is
hypotaxis (arrangement under, subordination). In this
way, through various stages of development, which correspond to our habitual
modes of thought, there were produced various forms of
complex sentences. Thus, to express the complex idea
I beseech you to pardon me, the two simple
sentence-forms
quaesō
and
īgnōscās
were used side by side,
quaesō
īgnōscās; then the
feeling of grammatical subordination found expression in a conjunction,
quaesō ut īgnōscās
, forming a complex sentence. The results of these processes
constitute the subject-matter of Syntax.