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Syntax - introduction
Why are the following sentences ungrammatical?
1. The rabbits have ran back to the hole.
2. The rabbits run have back to the hole.
3. They not have enough to eat.
4. Are the nuts where?
5. Acorns grow on.
6. Who do you think who ate the nuts?
Grammar:
Morphology - deals with word categories, forms of words.
Syntax - deals with position of words, construction models, and schemes
for connecting words into clauses or sentences.
Semantics deals with meaning.
History of syntax
The word syntax comes from Greek word syntaxis which means putting together. It
is about putting words together into sentences or how sentences are constructed.
The basic conceptual framework of modern linguistics was supplied by the
philosophers and grammarians of ancient Greece and Rome and passed down to
modern Europe and America by rhetoricians and language scholars.
Traditional grammar gave only a partial account of grammaticality.
It established some specific principles for certain languages, precisely Greek and
Latin.
It codified a large number of different grammatical constructions, but they were based
only on these two languages.
Traditional grammar failed to explain some syntactic occurences in language using
very common sense or the laws of thought, e.g. word order in Greek, Latin compared
to some other languages.
19th century comparative linguistics - the relationships between languages are
susceptible of rational explanation in structural terms and do not have to be attributed
to chance or to accidents of historical contact (working out of relationships between
languages with observed similarities).
Comparative philology marked the beginning of a structural approach to languages,
one which took systematic notice of features internal to language;
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Rejection of outer historical and cultural explanations of linguistic form and linguistic
relationship.
The most powerful influence on structuralist approach was that of Ferdinand de
Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (1916).
Langue and parole; synchronic and diachronic in descriptive linguistics; syntagmatic
and paradigmatic are some of his dichotomies.
Revolution in grammar/syntax
Such views of traditional and later structuralist grammar were followed by completely
new ideas much later, which caused the so-called revolution in syntactic analysis in
the mid 1950s.
In 1957, Noam Chomsky wrote his Syntactic structures. The approach was called
transformational-generative grammar.
Transformational:
- kernel sentences/transforms
Transformations: active vs. passive; questions; modalities etc.
Generative: generation of all and only the grammatical sentences of a language
(grammar rules must be so designed that we are able to produce all or any of the
possible sentences of the language)
Chomsky introduces the term of recursion ability to imbed structures iteratively
inside one other, which allows us to produce sentences we have never heard before.
Phrase structure grammar (PSG) Chomsky wanted to determine the mathematical
and logical designs of possible grammars, to evaluate their relative power,
insightfulness and economy.
Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) was used by structuralists and functionalists for
sentence analysis;
Chomsky wanted to prove that except generating certain sentences/utterances, we
need their transformations to prove whether such sentences can exist.
Constituent is a syntactic element of a sentence. It can be one word or group of
words which go together.
some sentences cannot be described in their surface structure and through IC, only
with transformations we can enter their deep structure.
E.g. John is eager to please.
John is easy to please.
Transformational rules perform at least three functions:
a) they relate sentences to one another, i.e.they explain how intuitively related
sentences are related.
b) they alter constituent structure by shifting parts of sentences around, by
deleting elements, e.g. you in imperatives, by adding constituents, e.g. adding ed
to past tense verbs.
c) they form the bridge between messages and signals, meanings and sounds.
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c) they form the bridge between messages and signals, meanings and sounds.
Surface and deep structure
Surface structure - the sentence with its grammaticality as you look at it and it seems
quite correct grammatically. It is a linear ordering of elements for concrete realization
in sound or script.
Deep structure - everything that speaker understands in such structure, including
meaning. It consists of complexity of words in certain elementary functional relations
with each other ('subject', 'object' etc.)

One of the best-known revolutionary sentence given by Chomsky was:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Later on Chomsky has been attacked for not giving due priority to semantic
considerations, (as his model of grammar is based on a syntactic core).
Syntax is...
The study of sentence formation
Subconscious grammatical knowledge
Word ordering
Grammaticality judgements
- Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.
- The children might being sing.
- We fed her snail poison.
- Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
- Me and Beth are watching a movie.
- Swedes like fish more than Italians.
- She aint got nothing to hide.
- A: ambiguous
*: ungrammatical
- #: grammatical but non-sensical
- %: grammatical in a non-standard v.
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Seminar paper
Phrase level: Noun Phrase; Verb Phrase; Adjective Phrase; Adverb Phrase;
Prepositional Phrase.
Clause level: Finite clauses (Relative clauses; Adverbial Clauses) Non-finite clauses (v-
ing; v-to.inf.; v-ed clauses)
Sentence level: simple sentence; complex sentence; compound sentence; complex-
compound sentence.
Function of the elements you want to analyze within the sentence: Subject;
Verb/Predicate; Direct/Indirect Object; Adverbial; Subject Complement; Object
Complement.
Example 1: Find a text of 10-15 pages and find the elements you want to analyze,
e.g. Noun Phrases. Analyze the syntactic structure of each Noun Phrase and its
function within the sentence.
Example 2: Analyze some non-finite clauses by identifying them and defining their
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Example 2: Analyze some non-finite clauses by identifying them and defining their
function within the sentence, e.g. To ensure confidentiality, we will conceal your name
and address.
Example 3: Analyze some finite clauses, e.g. Relative clauses, Adverbial clauses,
Nominal clauses, and define their function within the sentences/text.
Example 4: Find and analyze some transformations, e.g. Passive transformations and
try to explain what happens within the sentence structure, what kind of changes.
Example 5: Find and analyze ellipsis; define what kind of ellipsis it is, what happens
within the sentence structure?
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