Introduction to syntax

 *Syntax is the study of sentence structure in a language.
Scope- Types of sentences, phrases, clause, agreement and word
order etc.
 Syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern
the structure of sentences in a given language specifically word
order.
 The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic
rules common to all languages.

 Works on grammar were written long before
modern syntax came about.
 Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini (c. 4th century BC) is a
pre-modern work that approaches the
sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.

 A basic feature of a language's syntax is the sequence in which
the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) usually appear in
sentences.
 Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in
the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV.
 The other possible sequences are VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV,
the last three of which are rare.

 *A phrase is a collection of words that may have nouns,
but it does not have a subject doing a verb.
 Phrases are considered as the second level of classification
as they tend to be larger than individual words, but are
smaller than sentences.
 We refer to the central element in a phrase as the head of
the phrase. If the head is a noun then the phrase is called a
noun phrase.

Example
1. Noun -----My coach is happy. (noun phrase as subject)
2. Verb -------Henry made my coach very proud. (verb phrase as
predicate)
3. Adjectival------Dad bought [(a blue and green) sweater]
4. Adverbial------ He scored the goal very quickly.
5. Prepositional -------The man in the house rented it.
(prepositional phrase modifies a noun adjectivally)
6. Gerundive-------- Dad talked about winning the game.
7. Participial-------- Racing around the corner, he slipped and fell.
8. Infinitive------- My duty as a coach is to teach skills. (infinitive
phrase functions as a noun) My sister wanted a cat to love.
(infinitive phrase functions as an adjective)

A sentence is:
‘a sequence of words whose first word starts with
a capital letter and whose last word is followed
by an end punctuation mark (period/full stop,
question mark or exclamation mark)'

• All sentences are about something or someone.
• The something or someone that the sentence is
about is called the subject of the sentence.
• The predicate contains information about the
someone or something that is the subject.
• Examples.
John often comes late to class.
My friend and I both have a dog named Spot.

Construction refers to the overall process organization of
grammatical unit.
Example:
The old dog lay in the corner.
The above sentence contains two composite forms i.e.,
The Old dog and lay in the corner.

 Constituent is a combination of morphemes it is also
said that words which we use in construction.
 a constituent of a linguistic construction at the
first step in an analysis; for example, the
immediate constituents of a sentence are the subject
and the predicate.

Immediate constituent analysis or IC
analysis is a method of sentence analysis that
was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield.

Introduction to syntax

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Introduction to syntax (20)

More from Dr. Mohsin Khan (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Introduction to syntax