SYNTAX

syntax

The part of grammar that represents a speaker's knowledge of sentences and their structure

what syntax rules do?

Describe the relationship between the meaning of a group of words and the arrangement of the words.

Specify the grammatical relations of a sentence, such as the subject and the direct object. “Who is doing what to whom”

Generative Grammar

Grammaticality is not based on meaningfulness

Grammaticality is not based on truthfulness

Attempts to give a set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words will form a grammatical sentence.

Tall us how words form groups and are hierarchically ordered in a sentence.

Syntactic structure

The grammar will have a finite number of rules but will generate infinite number of well formed structures

Surface Structure:

It refers to the sentence as it is pronounced or written.

Deep structure:

An abstract level of structural organization

Syntactic categories

Noun Phrase

Verb Phrase

Prepositional Phrase

Adjetive Phrase

Adverb Phrase

Noun

Verb

Preposition

adjetive

Adverb

Auxiliary

determiners

Tree diagram

provides us visual representation of the constituents of the corresponding expression.

A phrase Estructure Tree:

Is a tree diagram with syntactic category information.

Node:

Immediately dominates the categories below it

Sisiter:

Categories immediately dominated by the same node. (Eg. V and NP are sisters)

Sentence structure

Constituents and

contituency test

Replacement