a little about syntax

Syntax

Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences, the principles, both universal and language specific, that govern how words are assembled to yield grammatical sentences.

Basic ideas of syntax

The structure of a sentence is the way that the words are organized into phrases, and the way those phrases are organized into larger phrasesDifferent languages have different sentence structures, and any sentence in a particular language will follow certain rules -some of which include word order, lexical categories, agreement, constituency and hierarchical structure.

Word order

Acceptable word order changes from language to language, so not every string of words in a language is a sentence -those that form actual sentences are called grammatical

Sentences that do not conform to a language's word order rules are ungrammatical

Lexical categories

Also called syntactic categories, or parts of speech -nouns, verbs, etc.To determine whether two words are from the same lexical category, substitute one for the other -if the sentence still makes grammatical sense, then they are likely part of the same lexical category Not all languages have the same lexical categories -most, however, have nouns and verbs

Agreement

Agreement is the principle that says that certain words need to have a specific property (an affix, for example) in order to work in a certain sentence While this is a big part of prescriptive grammar, agreement is an important part of syntax in many languages

Constituency and hierarchical structure

Structural ambiguity: The meaning of the sentence depends on how the words are put together word order alone is not enough to tell you the intended meaning The meaning depends on the sequence in which the words were combined -[more intelligent] administrators is different from more [intelligent administrators]

Constituent :

The group of words inside a bracket, which function as a discrete unit in the sentence

Hierarchical structure :

The order in which constituents were combined -often, constituents will be nested inside each othe

 

Syntactic Relations and phrase structure rules

Let's examine syntactic relations within English sentences.  One approach is to divide the words of a sentence into phrases (defined as words closely associated with one another syntactically).  This technique is know as parsing.  The most fundamental division is between subject and predicate. (of course, this is because we are cheating and ignoring sentence types that lack this division).  Phrases containing different parts of speech can serve one and the same function.

The big yellow dog //ate /bones 

He //ate the old bone.

The big yellow dog //slept.

The dog //growled at John.

The syntactic metalanguage used in writing phrase structure rules involves mainly abbreviations from English words for parts of speech.

S--> NP VP  A sentence consists of a noun phrase and a verb phrase. (These correspond to subject and predicate.)

NP--> (art) (adj) N or NP --> pronoun

(Go over exercise 5 on page116 in the textbook.)

Phrase structure rules are said to be recursive.  That is, identical elements in the structure of a phrase can repeat.  These repeating elements are sometimes known as parallel items in a series: 

Parallel subjects: the sentence John came--John, Bill, and Mary came. is a simple sentence with a recursive subject.   (Compare John came and Bill came which is a compound sentence each part of which has a simple subject.)

Parallel verbs: Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

Parallel modifiers: 

adverbs:  a very good book--a very, very good book; or                             

adjectives: a green and red and pink and blue book.

Parallel compound sentences:I came and Bill came and Mary came and...

Multiple subordinate clauses in a complex sentence: I know an old lady who swallowed a fly which was 

chased by her cat who had been bored because there was nothing to do in the house that Jack built when he. . .

Remember the ability of syntactic elements to occur in multiples is known as recursion.

http://pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test1materials/syntax.htm
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/research/syntax
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~hana/teaching/2015wi-ling/06-Syntax.pdf