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Syntax
Syntax is the study of the part of the human linguistic system that determines how sentences are put together out of words. Syntactic rules in a grammar account for the grammaticality of sentences, and the ordering of words and morphemes.
Syntax
Syntax involves our knowledge of structural ambiguity our knowledge that sentences may be paraphrases of each other our knowledge of the grammatical function of each part of a sentence, that is, of the grammatical relations.
Syntax
It is also concerned with speakers' ability to produce and understand an infinite set of possible sentences. The sentence is regarded the highest-ranking unit of grammar, and therefore that the purpose of a grammatical description is to define, making use of whatever descriptive apparatus that may be necessary (rules, categories, etc).
Sentence
Clause
Phrase/Group Word Morpheme
Sentence Structure
One aspect of the syntactic structure of sentences is the division of a sentence into phrases, and those phrases into further phrases, and so forth. Another aspect of the syntactic structure of a sentence is "movement" relations that hold between one syntactic position in a sentence and another.
Constituents
A unit forming part of a larger structure Chalker and Weiner 1998 Although the term string is often used technically to refer to sequences of words, sentences are not merely strings of words in a permissible order and making sense. They are structured into successive components, consisting of single words or groups of words. These groups and single words are called constituents (i.e. structural units), and when they are considered as part of the successive unraveling of a sentence, they are known as its immediate constituents.
Constituents
When we consider sentence My friend came home late last night, we find out that it consists of seven word arranged in a particular order. In syntax, the seven words in this model sentence are its ultimate constituents. This sentence and in general any sentence of the language may be represented as a particular arrangement of the ultimate constituents, which are the minimal grammatical elements, of which the sentence is composed. Every sentence has therefore what we will refer to as a linear structure. The small units are known as its immediate constituents.
The segmentation of the sentence up into its immediate constituents by using binary cuttings until its ultimate constituents are obtained is an important approach to the realization of the nature of language, called Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC Analysis). The analysis can be carried out in ways of tree diagrams, bracketing or any other. For example: (1) Poor| John ran |out.
construction
A construction is a relationship between constituents. Constructions are divided into two types: endocentric constructions and exocentric constructions. Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents. A word or a group of words acts as a definable center or head. Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole. There is no definable center or head inside the group.
Endocentric Construction
Some types of phrase contain a HEAD word and have the same formal function in their clause as the single head would:
Too dreadful Rather more surprisingly She who must be obeyed
Exocentric Construction
Containing no element that is functionally equivalent to the whole structure (non-headed or unheaded) Some phrases are always exocentric The boy stood on the burning deck. Who was the man in the iron mask? A basic English sentence (consisting of subject and predicate) is always exocentric, since neither part can stand for the whole:
Syntactic Rules
Three universal basic syntactic rules:
Linear order of constituents Categorization of constituents Grouping of constituents into constituent structures
Sentence Types
Sentences in any language are constructed from a rather small set of basic structural patterns and through certain processes involving the expansion or transformation of these basic patterns. When we consider sentence types from another perspective, it can be shown that each of the longer sentences of a language (and these are in the majority usually) is structured in the same way as one of a relatively small number of short sentences which are impossible to reduce to a short form. These short sentences have the basic sentence types. There are different ways of dealing with sentence types.
Sentence Types
The structure of every sentence is a lesson in logic.
John Stuart Mill
Simple Sentence
A simple sentence contains only one clause with a single verb group. Dora yelled. Christ resembled his father. Jack and Jill love each other. A runner from Ethiopia won the New York marathon this year. The students should have been working on the term paper.
Complex Sentence
A complex sentence is composed of two clauses with one holding main status (matrix clause) and the other incorporated or embedded into it (embedded clause), which is often introduced by a subordinator (who, that, though, when, because, as, since, although)
Mark denied that Dora yelled. The murderer escaped when the police arrived at the scene.
Syntactic Function
The traditional approach to syntactic function identifies constituents of the sentence, states the part of speech each word belongs to, describes the inflexion involved, and explains the relationship each word related to the others.
According to its relation to other constituents, a constituent may serve certain syntactic function in a clause.
This diagram formally reads as 1. B and C are constituents of A 2. D and E are constituents of C. 3. D and E are not constituents of B as they are not linked to B.
Tree Diagrams
Who climbs the Grammar-Tree distinctly knows Where Noun and Verb and Participle grows.
John Dryden
In describing the constituent of a structure, a tree diagram is employed as a tool to link members of a structure.
Joyce Kilmer
Dominance 1. VP node dominates all the other nodes. 2. VP node immediately dominates the nodes labeled V and PP.
Precedence 1. V node precedes the nodes labeled PP, P, NP, det, and N as well as in, the and house. 2. V node immediately precedes the PP, P and in.
Case
Inflectional category, basically of nouns, which typically marks their role in relation to other parts of the sentence. The case category is often used in the analysis of word classes to identify the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence.
Chomskyan Syntax
Syntax is seen to be a fundamental principle for encoding and decoding meaning and is the part of grammar shared by speakers and listeners in communication. In 1957, the American linguist Chomsky proposed the transformationalgenerative grammar (TG), thus providing a model for the description of human languages. The goal of TG is to find out a system of rules to account for the linguistic competence of native speakers of a language to form grammatical sentences.
Chomskyan Syntax
It is called "transformational-generative" grammar because it attempts to do two things: to provide the rules that can be used to generate grammatical sentences how basic sentences can be transformed into either synonymous phrases or more complex sentences.
Surface structure is the actually produced structure. directly observable actual form of sentences as they are used in communication
The relationship between deep structure and surface structure is that of transformation. Since the relationship is usually a complicated one, we can best use transformational rules in the total process of relating deep structure to surface structures.