Šmilauer – Tesnière – závislostní syntax

Abstract

The article compares two representative approaches to the description of dependency syntax: Šmilauer’s syntax for Czech (1947) and Tesnière’s structural syntax focused on syntax in general (1959). Similarities and differences between the two leading representatives of modern syntax are the object of comparison. The degree of general knowledge of Tesnière’s approach in the Czech environment is considered in the works of Šmilauer before Tesnière’s most comprehensive work was published. Both authors use graphic means to capture the syntactic structure of a sentence, called stemmata by Tesnière. Both authors, however, differ in their conception of the central sentence pair of syntactic structure: subject and predicate. While Šmilauer considers the subject to be the basic source of agreement for the predicate, for Tesnière the subject is one of the members dependent on the verb (in the same vein as the objects or adverbials). This approach then led Tesnière to introduce the notion of verbal valency reflecting the necessary participants in the action expressed by the verb. Both authors also differ in their representation of the order of words in the graphic representation: Šmilauer respects the surface order of words in the sentence structure, while Tesnière mostly places the actants to the left of the governing verb and the circumstants to the right.