Syntax - A Resume

     Today I will explain about syntax. Most of us know about grammar because it's so common to us. But what about syntax? Syntax may be more specific and don't really matters for most people, but it's never wrong to learn something. In this resume I will tell simply about syntax!

    Syntax is basically about what word comes before and after another word; in other words, it's part of the larger subject of grammar. Syntax is often an issue in poetry, and it's usually discussed in connection with diction—that is, the poet's choice of words. So, for example, your English professor might point out the syntactic difference between "Whose woods these are I think I know" and "I think I know whose woods these are;" whereas if the discussion was about diction instead, the question might be about the choice of "woods" rather than "land", or "think" rather than "bet".

    The rules of syntax, together with all the other rules of one’s language, constitute the grammar of the language. If a sequence of words forming a sentence is consistent with the rules of the grammar, we say that the sentence is grammatical; if not, the sequence of words is ungrammatical; that is, it does not form a grammatical sentence.

    If a grammar defines a sentence as being grammatical, we say that the grammar generates that sentence. Linguists refer to gram- mars of this type as generative grammars, and the field of study devoted to discovering their properties is known as the field of generative grammar.

    We are going to look at some syntactic data, drawn from both English and a variety of other languages. The words in the English lexicon are subdivided into several lexical classes, or categories. The lexical categories that we discussed include the following:

Verb (V) (attack, appear, burglarize, carry, fall, hit, kill, kiss, love, marry, quit)

Adjective (A) (careful, fair, happy, idiotic, lucky, old, red) 

Adverb (Adv) (again, carefully, fairly, luckily, never, very)

Noun (N) (broth, friend, girl, happiness, king, lover, Moor, sword, witch)

Proper Noun (Name) (Bianca, Duncan, Desdemona, Hamlet, Kate, Macbeth, Ophelia)

Determiner (D) (a, an, that, the, this)

Preposition (P) (about, for, from, in, of, to, under)

Pronoun (Prn) (I, me, we, us, you, he, him, she, her, it, they, them)

Auxiliary (Aux) (can, must, should, will, did, is, were, have, had)

(1) a. Desdemona will marry a Moor.

b. Macbeth has killed the king.

(2) a. *Marry will Moor a Desdemona.

b. *Killed the Macbeth has king.

(If a sequence of words does not form a grammatical sentence, we indicate this fact by placing a star (*) in front of it)

    Note that the words will and has belong to the category of auxiliary verbs or auxiliaries. This is a closed lexical class, which includes a subgroup of modal auxiliaries or modals, including words like can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, and would.

    The ungrammatical status of the example sentences in (2) shows that each lexical category is only allowed to occur in certain positions in the sentence; the words cannot be randomly placed in any position without regard to their lexical category.

    Another aspect of syntax is concerns a typological classification of languages in terms of basic constituent order, that is, the typical way in which words are arranged in simple sentences such as the following:

(6) a. Macbeth murdered Duncan.

b. Duncan murdered Macbeth.

(7) a. Othello liked Desdemona.

b. Desdemona liked Othello.

(8) a. Othello pleased Desdemona.

b. Desdemona pleased Othello.

    The sentences in each pair of examples contain the same three words (two names and a verb), but they convey very different meanings, as a result of their different word orders. Thus, in (6a), Macbeth is the murderer, whereas in (6b), he is the victim; similarly, (7a) and (8b) describe Othello’s opinion of Desdemona, whereas (7b) and (8a) describe her opinion of him.

Syntax Trees

    The idea that the words of a sentence are grouped together to form phrases implies that sentences are not just composed of sequences of words; rather, they are composed of phrases. The particular way in which these phrases are formed results in a specific structure for each sentence; this structure can be represented in the form of syntactic tree diagrams.

That's all for now, thanks for reading my resume. See you next time.