Cover not available
Part of
Chapters of Dependency Grammar: A historical survey from Antiquity to Tesnière
Edited by András Imrényi and Nicolas Mazziotta
[Studies in Language Companion Series 212] 2020
► pp. 189–214

Chapter 6
Franz Kern

An early dependency grammarian

 | Zhejiang University, Hangzhou
An examination of Franz Kern’s main works (1883a, 1883b, 1884, 1886, 1888) quickly reveals that his concept of sentence structure is closely similar to many modern analyses in the tradition of dependency grammar (DG). Kern took the finite verb as the sentence root and positioned the subject and object phrases as equi-level dependents of the verb in a like manner. In so doing, he was rejecting the binary subject-predicate division associated with the works of some of his contemporaries, most notably, Reed and Kellogg (1876). The aspect of Kern’s understanding of sentence structure that is particularly valuable in tracing the development of dependency syntax was his use of sentence diagrams. Kern produced numerous diagrams that are similar to the stemmas Tesnière used approximately 60 years later. Thus, Kern’s works on sentence structure stand as a particularly clear manifestation of dependency syntax long before dependency grammar became associated primarily with Tesnière’s efforts (1953, 1959). Interestingly, Tesnière did not cite Kern. This situation raises a basic question about whether Tesnière knew about Kern’s works at all, or whether he was indirectly influenced by Kern through the ideas of other German grammarians following in a tradition that Kern had helped establish many decades earlier.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aspects of Kern’s DG
    • 2.1Finite verbs and complex predicates
    • 2.2Prepositions and subordinators
    • 2.3Secondary predicates
    • 2.4Coordination
  • 3.Kern’s impact
  • 4.Who influenced Kern?
  • 5.Kern vs. Tesnière
  • 6.Summary and concluding comments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 February 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.212.07osb
References (29)
References
A. Primary sources
Becker, K. F. (1841). Organismus der Sprache (2. neubearbeitete Ausgabe). Frankfurt: Kettembeil.Google Scholar
Billroth, G. (1832). Lateinische Syntax für die obern Klassen gelehrter Schulen. Leipzig: Weidmann.Google Scholar
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York, NY: Holt, Reinhart & Winston.Google Scholar
Brassai, S. (1873). Paraleipomena kai diorthoumena. A mit nem mondtak s a mit roszul mondtak a commentatorok Virg. Aeneise II. könyvére [What the commentators did not say or wrongly said about Book II of Virgil’s Aeneid]. Budapest: MTA.Google Scholar
Clark, S. W. (1847). Science of English language. A practical grammar: In which words, phrases, and sentences are classified according to their offices, and their relations to each other. Illustrated by a complete system of diagrams. New York, NY: A. S. Barnes.Google Scholar
Green, H. R. (1873). A drillbook in the etymology and syntax of the English language. New York, NY: Woolworth, Ainsworth.Google Scholar
Kern, F. (1883a). Die Deutsche Satzlehre: Eine Untersuchung ihrer Grundlagen. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
(1883b). Zur Methodik des deutschen Unterrichts. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
(1884). Grundriss der Deutschen Satzlehre. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
(1886). Betrachtungen über den Anfangsunterricht in der deutschen Satzlehre. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
(1888). Leitfaden für den Anfangsunterricht in der Deutschen Grammatik. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung.Google Scholar
Reed, A., & Kellogg, B. 1909. Graded lessons in English: An elementary English grammar: Consisting of one hundred practical lessons carefully graded and adapted to the class-room. New York, NY: Charles E. Merrill. (Original work published 1876)Google Scholar
Tesnière, L. (1953). Esquisse d’une syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
(1959). Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.Google Scholar
(2015). Elements of structural syntax (Trans. by T. Osborne & S. Kahane). Amsterdam: John Benjamins (Trans. of Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck, 1966, 2nd ed.; 1st ed., 1959). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
B. Critical sources
Baum, R. (1976). Dependenzgrammatik: Tesnière’s Modell der Sprachbeschreibung in wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher und kritischer Sicht. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coseriu, E. (1980). Un précurseur méconnu de la syntaxe structurale: H. Tiktin. In Recherches linguistique: Hommages à Maurice Leroy (pp. 48–62). Bruxelles: Université de Bruxelles.Google Scholar
Engel, U. (1980). Einführung des Herausgebers. In L. Tesnière (Au.), Grundzüge der strukturalen Syntax (Ed. and Trans. U. Engel). Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.Google Scholar
Eroms, H.-W. (2000). Syntax der deutschen Sprache. Berlin: De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Happ, H. (1976). Grundfragen einer Dependenz-Grammatik des Lateinischen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.Google Scholar
Helbig, G., & Buscha, J. (1998). Deutsche Grammatik: Ein Handbuch für den Ausländerunterricht (18th ed.). Leipzig: Langenscheidt.Google Scholar
Homberger, D. (1993). Das Prädikat im Deutschen: Linguistische Terminologie in Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachdidaktik. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hudson, R. (1988). Coordination and grammatical relations. Journal of Linguistics 24, 303–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hudson, R. (1989). Gapping and grammatical relations. Linguistics 25, 57–94. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Keinästö, K. (2001). “Unberechtigtes Altes umstoßen und berechtigtes Neues einführen”: Franz Kern als Vorläufer der deutschen Dependenzgrammatik. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Lobin, H. (1993). Koordinationssyntax als prozedurales Phänomen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.Google Scholar
Mel’čuk, I. (1988). Dependency syntax: Theory and practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Schubert, K. (1987). Metataxis: Contrastive dependency syntax for machine translation. Dordrecht: Foris. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tarvainen, K. (1981). Einführung in die Dependenzgrammatik (2. unveränderte Auflage). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Cited by (4)

Cited by four other publications

Cigana, Lorenzo
2020. Chapter 7. Some aspects of dependency in Otto Jespersen’s structural syntax. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 216 ff. DOI logo
Imrényi, András & Zsuzsa Vladár
2020. Chapter 5. Sámuel Brassai in the history of dependency grammar. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 164 ff. DOI logo
Mazziotta, Nicolas
2020. Chapter 4. Dependency in early sentence diagrams. In Chapters of Dependency Grammar [Studies in Language Companion Series, 212], ► pp. 134 ff. DOI logo
Mazziotta, Nicolas
2023. Syntaxe en n dimensions : choisir et représenter les espaces d’analyse. Travaux de linguistique n° 84-85:1 ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.