Meeting 4

SYNTAX
“the study of the
sentence patterns of
language”
 What is syntax?
• In order to study the languages, one should know
how to put the words together to form phrases and
sentences that express our thoughts.
• The part of the grammar that concerns the structure
of phrases and sentences is called syntax.
• A sentence is a string of words or morpheme, but
every such string is not a sentence. Rules of
grammar determine how morphemes and words can
combine to express specific meaning.
 continuation
• When you know a language, then, you know
which combination or strings of morphemes are
permitted by the syntactic rules and which are
not.

• Those strings that conform to the syntactic rules

are called the sentences or grammatical
sentences of the languages, and strings of
morphemes that do not are called
ungrammatical.
 continuation
• In simply way, we can say that sentences are
units that are somehow basic-that have an
integrity.

• They are the smallest units that can stand alone

(a complete verbal exchange might consist of a
single sentence), and all the larger units are
composed of sentence.

• In traditional school-grammar, sentence is

defined as a group of words that expresses a
complete thought.
 Some Syntactic Rules
1. Syntactic knowledge (syntactic rules) goes beyond
being able to decide which strings are grammatical
and which are not. It accounts for the double
meaning, or ambiguity. For example, the ambiguity
phrase synthetic buffalo hides, which can mean
buffalo hides that are synthetic, or hides of synthetic
buffalo. The ambiguity results because syntactic
rules allow the following two structures:

synthetic buffalo hides synthetic buffalo hides

 continuation
2. Syntactic knowledge also plays a role in
determining when two non identical sentences
have the same meaning and when they do not. For
example, the following sentences mean
approximately the same thing, although they differ
in syntactic structure:

Pleasing Disa is fun for Vicki.

It is fun for Vicki to please Disa.
 continuation
3. Knowledge of English syntactic rules also enables
us to determine how different parts of a sentence
are related. In the sentences:

The student solved the problem.

The problem was solved by the student.

the student is the grammatical or structural subject

only of the first sentence, but it is logically the
subject of both sentences. Syntactic rules specify
such grammatical and logical relations, which,
together with semantic rules, reveal the meaning
associations in sentences.
 continuation
4. Finally, syntactic rules permit speakers to produce and
understand an unlimited number of sentences never
produced or heard before-the creative aspect of
language. Thus syntactic rules in grammar must at least
account for:
a.the grammaticality of sentences
b.the ordering of words and morphemes
c.structural ambiguity
d.the fact that sentences with different structures can
have the same meaning
e.the grammatical and logical relation within a sentences
f. speaker’s creative ability to produce and understand
any of an infinite set of possible sentences
 Sentence Structure

• Syntactic rules determine the correct order

of words in a sentence. In English we
know that an article like the or an
precedes a noun like animal, but
sentences are more than words placed
one after another like beads on a string.
The words of a sentence can be divided
into two or more groups, and within each
group the words can be divided into
subgroups, and so on, until only single
words remain.
 continuation
For example, the sentence:

The child found the puppy.

is composed of two main groups, or constituents/

units. All subparts of sentences can be called
constituents, from individual words like child to
multiword phrases like the child to the entire
sentences itself.
The example above composed of two constituent:
the child found the puppy
corresponding to the “subject” and “predicate” of the
sentence.
 continuation
• These groups can be further subdivided until the original
sentence is represented in the following branching
diagram:

The child found the puppy

the child found the puppy

the child found the puppy

the puppy
 continuation
• Such a diagram is called a constituent structure tree.
The “tree” is upside down with the “root” at the top and
the “leaves” at the bottom.
• At each point where the tree “branches,” there is group
of words that form a part or structural constituent of
the sentence.
• At the bottom of the tree are the individual words or
morphemes. In addition to revealing linear order, a
constituent structure tree has hierarchical structure.
• This expression means that the groups and subgroups of
words composing the structural constituents are shown
by the level on which they appear in the tree.
 Syntactic Category
• As mentioned before, that a sentence is a
group of words that expresses a complete
thought. This complete thought means that
there is a noun phrase followed by a verb
phrase in a sentence. A phrase itself is any
grouping of words that acts as a constituent.
Constituents that can be substituted for one
another without loss of grammaticality belong to
the same syntactic category.
 continuation
1. Noun Phrase (NP): NP may be easily identified
because they can function as “subject” or “object” in a
sentence, and only noun Phrase may do so. Noun
Phrases generally contain a Noun or Pronoun. These
noun phrases all consist of an article and a noun, and
so it is described a phrase-structure rule for noun
phrase:

NP Art N

it is the noun that gives its name to the phrase. The

noun is in a sense the most important constituent of the
noun phrase.
 continuation
2. Verb Phrase (VP): VP always contain a Verb,
which may be followed by other constituents, such
as a Noun Phrase. VP V NP. Sometimes
a Verb Phrase (VP) may also consist of a Verb
followed by a Noun Phrase followed by a
Prepositional Phrase (PP). in addition, a PP is a
Preposition (P) followed by a Noun Phrase (NP).

VP V NP (PP)
PP P NP
 continuation
3. Other syntactic categories are Sentence
(S), article (Art), Noun (N), and Verb (V).
Some of these syntactic categories
should be familiar, they have traditionally
been called “part of speech”.
 Phrase Structure Rules/ PS rules
In general, the PS rules commonly used
are:
1. Bottom up process
For example:

The boy destroyed a toy

Art N V Art N

S
 continuation
2. Top down process. For example:

Art N V Art N
 EXERCISES
1. Which branch of linguistics studies sentence pattern of
language?
a. Morphology
b. Pragmatics
c. Syntax
d. Semantics
e. Phonology
2. What is the definition of morpheme?
a. the smallest meaning-bearing unit of language
b. the internal structure of words
c. a word consisting of two or more morphemes
d. the smallest word in sentence
e. the external structure of words
 continuation
3. The suffix /ing/ is an example of a (an)…….
a. Phoneme
b. Auxiliary verb
c. Morpheme
d. Pronoun
e. Word
 continuation
4. Bruno plays soccer.
From that sentence above, what is the syntactic
categories?
a. Pronoun-Noun-Preposition
b. Subject-Noun-Noun
c. Noun-Verb-Article
d. Noun-Verb-Noun
e. Article-Verb-Noun
 continuation
5. Syntactic categories has the other traditionally
name….
a. Part of Speech
b. Part of Language
c. Part of Body
d. Part of Linguistic
e. Part of Syntactic
 Answer Key
1. c
2. a
3. c
4. d
5. a