SYNTAX

One of the common problems of English language is about how to study the structure of words and the component of  the grammar.  Languages have rules. The rules of a language are called the grammar. The reason for these rules is that a person needs to be able to speak an indeterminately large number of sentences in a lifetime. The effort would be impossibly great if each sentence had to be learnt separately.

By learning the rules for connecting words it is possible to create an infinite number of sentences, all of which are meaningful to a person who knows the syntax. Thus it is possible to construct many sentences that the speaker has never heard before. Relevant to this are the questions of what is universal to language, how language can vary, and how the human know about languages. All humans achieve competence in whatever language is spoken. In mastering the speaking skill, for instance, the learners must be trained and equipped with a certain degree of accuracy and fluency in understanding, responding in speech. Syntax  is the sentence pattern of language to complete our knowledge to study language grammatical and ungrammatical.  In order for this to work with any degree of success, the rules have to be precise and have to be consistently adhered to. These rules cover such things as: the way words are constructed; the way the endings of words are changed according to context (inflection); the classification of words into parts of speech (nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc.); the way parts of speech are connected together. Linguistics structures are pairings of meaning and form.

A.     The Representations of Syntax

The syntactic rules of a grammar also account for the fact that even though the following sequence is made up of meaningful words, it has no meaning. In English and in every language, every sentence is a sequence of words, but not every sequence of words is a sentence. Sequences of words that conform to the rules of syntax are said to be well formed or grammatical and those that violate the syntactic rules are therefore ill formed or ungrammatical. In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for instance, for the following sentence: "The boy cut the trees"

 The syntax can be described, by the following methods:

1. Syntactic Categories

Noun phrase may function as the subject or as various objects in a sentence, and they contain some form of a noun (common noun such as boy, proper noun such as David, or pronoun such as he). Since he is a single word, you may question our calling it a phrase, but technically a syntactic phrase can consist of one or more words.

Example: The boy cut the trees

Subject          = "The boy" (article followed by noun)

verb               = "cut"

object            = "The trees" (article followed by noun)

There are other syntactic categories. The expression cut the trees is a verb phrase (VP). Verb phrase always contain a verb  (V), which may be followed by other categories, such as  a noun phrase (NP) or prepositional phrase (PP).

Other syntactic categories are :

1.      Sentence (S)

2.      Determiner (Det)

3.      Adjective (Adj)

4.      Noun (N)

5.      Pronoun (Pro)

6.      Preposition (Pre)

7.      Prepositional phrase (PP)

8.      Adverb (Adv)

9.      Auxiliary verb (Aux)

10.  Verb (V)

2. By a series of transformational rules

For example:

Sentence        noun phrase + verb phrase

Verb phrase        verb + noun phrase

Noun phrase       article + noun

The boy cut the trees “is transformed into”

Verb phrase     =          “cut the trees

Noun phrase    =          “the boy” and “the trees”

3. Phrase Structure Trees

Here, the parts of a sentence are shown in a graphical way that emphasises the hierarchical relationships between the components of a sentence. For example:

Subject = “the boy” (article + noun)

Verb = “cut”

Object = “the trees” (article + noun)

A tree diagram with syntactic category information provided is called a phrase structure trees.

The above structure is the basic syntactic structure for a sentence in the English language. As more complex sentences are considered, it is easy, by this method, to see how these different structures relate to each other, by further breaking down the branches of the structure. The syntax of the language contains the rules which govern the structure of phrases and how these can be joined together.

The structures and associated rules vary from one language to another. Parsing diagrams are capable of representing not just one particular language’s grammar but are capable of representing any kind of grammar. For instance, they can be used to represent the rules of invented languages such as computer programming languages.

By this method, we can show the types of syntactic structures and show how they relate to each other by expending or contracting branches of the structure.

B.  More Complex Syntactic Structures

1.  Embedding

It is possible to construct sentences which are more complex than the example above. This is done by embedding further phrases within the basic structure. For example, in the sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball.""with red shorts" is a prepositional phrase that further describes “the boy” .This can be represented, within the basic sentence structure as follow:

Here we can see how the Prepositional Phrase (PP) “with red shorts” is embedded within the subject Noun Phrase (NP) so that the subject is subdivided into a Noun Phrase and Prepositional Phrase (PP). The Prepositional Phrase itself contains a further Noun Phrase.

The parsing diagram clearly shows the hierarchical relationship between the sentence and its components. There are many other ways of extending this structure by embedding subordinate phrases at different parts of the basic structure.

2. Conjoining.

It is also possible to extend sentences by joining together complete structures or complete and incomplete structures, for example: "The boy with red shorts kicked the ball and scored a goal"

The conjunction “and” joins together the complete sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball"

and the verb phrase: “scored a goal

From the short explanations above we can take conclusions that:  syntax is the sentence patterns of language. In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, such as  syntactic category, phrase structure trees, transformational rules and more complex syntactic structures in language can be described by  methods embedding and conjoining.