What is Syntax?

An introduction
Syntax

• From Greek, Syntax is from syn (together) + taxis

(arrangement), i.e. to arrange items together.

• Syntax – the part of linguistics that studies the structure of

sentence in terms of order and function of various elements
of a sentence.
 Word order
Word order refers to the way words are arranged in a sentence. The
standard word order in English is:
Subject + Verb + Object (SVO). To determine the proper sequence of words,
you need to understand what the subject, verb and object(s) are.
• Subject: typically a noun or pronoun—the person, place or thing

• Verb: the action or state of being

• Object: the word or group of words influenced by the verb

• The sequence of words is critical when communicating in English because

it can impact the meaning of what you’re trying to say. 
Word order…
• Word order?
1.
• A. I want these books.
• *B. want these I books.
2.
• * A. Dropped the boy the ball.
B. The boy dropped the ball.
* C. The ball dropped the boy.
Agreement
In syntax, agreement is the correspondence of:

• Subject with its verb in person and number,

• Pronoun with its antecedent in person, number, and
gender.
• Demonstratives and nouns 

• Another term for grammatical agreement is concord.

Agreement…
• 1. Subject-verb:
• A. John drinks a lot of water.
• *B. John drink a lot of water.

• A. Ali is writing a letter.

• *B. Ali are writing a letter.

• A. We are playing cricket.

• *B. We is playing cricket.

• A. You have won the match.

• *B. You has won the match.
Agreement…

• 2. Pronoun-antecedent:
• A. Ayesha has done her work.
• *B. Ayesha has done their work.

• 3. Demonstratives and nouns:

• A. This book is mine.
• *B. These book is mine.
• A. Those people are mad.
• *B. That people are mad.
Case-Marking
‘Case’ means ‘role’; and ‘Case-marking’ refers to assigning
roles to nouns or noun phrases (NPs) in respect to verbs in a
sentence. The nouns or noun phrases that are assigned roles
are technically known as Arguments.

• In other words, case-marking is marking the arguments

(NPs) in a sentence in respect to verbs to indicate what is
the subject and what is the object of the verb.
Case-marking…
Case-marking is implemented in various languages, in
various ways including:

• word-order (English)
• inflection (German, Russian, Arabic, etc.)
• adposition (Pashto, Japanese, Korean, etc.)
Case-marking…

English mostly uses word-order to distinguish subjects of

verbs from the objects of verbs, e.g.

• John kicked the ball.

‘John’ is the ‘subject’ because it is marked by preceding the

verb ‘kicked’ and ‘the ball’ is the ‘object’ because it is
marked by following the verb.
Case-marking…
English, moreover, also uses inflection and pre-positions to mark
cases. For example,
John introduced his mother to William.
• First, the subject of the verb is ‘John’, which is so marked by
preceding the verb,
• The direct object is ‘his mother’, which is so marked by
following the verb
• And the pre-position ‘to’ marks ‘William’ as the indirect object
of the verb ‘introduced’.
• Finally, the word ‘his’ is an inflected form of ‘he’ used here to
mark its genitive role in relation to the relational-noun
‘mother’.
 Prominent Cases in English
S.
No Name Marker Role and Example
Used before Usually the subject of a verb
1 Nominative
verb {John/He/She} respects everyone
Used after Usually the direct object of a transitive verb
2 Accusative
verb Everyone respects {John/him/her}
Usually the indirect object of a di-transitive verb
3 Dative To
John wrote a letter to {William/him/her}.
Usually the indirect object of a di-transitive verb
4 Ablative from
John received a letter from {William/him/her}
Usually the agent in passive construction
5 Perlative by
John is respected by {William/him/her}.
Associated with some relational nouns, i.e. mother, brother,
of friend, capital etc.
6 Genitive
‘s Laila is the mother of Ali.
Grammar
• A set of rules for a language
The prescriptive approach

The claim that the structure of English sentences should be like the
structure of sentences in Latin. That was an approach taken by a
number of influential grammarians, mainly in eighteenth-century
England, who set out rules for the “proper” use of English. This view of
grammar as a set of rules for the “proper” use of a language is still to
be found today and may be best characterized as the prescriptive
approach. Some familiar examples of prescriptive rules for English
sentences are:
• i. You must not split an infinitive.
• ii. You must not end a sentence with a preposition.
Prescriptive approach…
• Following prescriptive rules, traditional teachers would correct
sentences like:
• Who did you go with? to (With whom did you go? (making sure that
the preposition with was not at the end of the sentence).
• Mary runs faster than me. to (Mary runs faster than I.)
• Me and my family… to (My family and I...) Let’s take one example:
“You must not split an infinitive.”
• The infinitive in English has the form ‘to + the base form’ of the verb,
as in ‘to go’ and can be used with an adverb such as boldly. Captain
Kirk, always used the expression ‘To boldly go’ … This is an example
of a split infinitive. (since that time the split infinitive became
known as Captain Kirk Infinitive.
The descriptive approach

Prescriptive approach is less useful for English, and may be absolutely

misleading if you are trying to describe some non-European
languages. This last point became clear to those linguists who were
trying to describe the structure of the native languages of North
America toward the end of the nineteenth century. The categories
and rules that were appropriate for Latin grammar just did not seem
to fit these languages. As a consequence, for most of the twentieth
century, a rather different approach was adopted. Analysts collected
samples of the language they were interested in and attempted to
describe the regular structures of the language as it was used, not
according to some view of how it should be used. This is called the
descriptive approach.
Structural analysis

One type of descriptive approach is called structural analysis and its

main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a language.
The method involves the use of “test-frames” that can be sentences
with empty slots in them. For example:

The [ ]makes a lot of noise. I heard a yesterday.

• There are a lot of forms that can fit into these slots to produce good
grammatical sentences of English (e.g. car, child, donkey, dog, radio).
As a result, we can propose that because all these forms fit in the
same test-frame, they are likely to be examples of the same
grammatical category. The label we give to this grammatical
category is, of course, “noun.”
Constituent analysis

• An approach with the same descriptive aims is called constituent

analysis. The technique employed in this approach is designed to
show how small constituents (or components) in sentences go
together to form larger constituents. One basic step is determining
how words go together to form phrases. In the following sentence, we
can identify nine constituents at the word level:
• An old man brought a shotgun to the wedding.
• We are more likely to say that the phrase-like constituents here are
combinations of the following types: an old man, a shotgun, the
wedding, which are noun phrases; to the wedding, which is a
prepositional phrase; and brought a shotgun, which is a verb phrase.
Generative grammar
Another goal of syntactic analysis, which is to have a small and finite
(i.e. limited) set of rules that will be capable of producing a large and
potentially infinite (i.e. unlimited) number of well-formed structures.
• This small and finite set of rules is sometimes described as a
generative grammar because it can be used to “generate” or produce
sentence structures and not just describe them. This type of grammar
should also be capable of revealing the basis of two other
phenomena:
• first, how some superficially different sentences are closely related
and,
• second, how some superficially similar sentences are in fact different.
Deep and surface structure

Two superficially different sentences are shown in these examples:

• Charlie broke the window. The window was broken by Charlie.
• In traditional grammar, the first is called an active sentence,
focusing on what Charlie did, and the second is a passive sentence,
focusing on the window and what happened to it. The distinction
between them is a difference in their surface structure, that is, the
different syntactic forms they have as individual English sentences.
However, this superficial difference in form disguises the fact that
the two sentences are very closely related, even identical, at some
less superficial level. This other “underlying” level, where the basic
components (Noun Phrase +Verb + Noun Phrase) shared by the two
sentences can be represented, is called their deep structure.
The deep structure

The deep structure is an abstract level of structural organization in

which all the elements determining structural interpretation are
represented.

• (Noun Phrase +Verb + Noun Phrase)

Surface structure
The deep structure can be the source of many surface structures
such as:

• Charlie broke the window.

• The window was broken by Charlie.
• It was Charlie who broke the window.
• Was the window broken by Charlie?

The generative grammar is capable of showing how a single

underlying abstract representation can become different surface
structures.
Structural ambiguity

Sentences can also be structurally ambiguous:

• Annie bumped into a man with an umbrella.
This sentence provides an example of structural ambiguity. It has
two distinct underlying interpretations that have to be
represented differently in deep structure:
• “Annie had an umbrella and she bumped into a man with it.”
The other expresses the idea that:
• “Annie bumped into a man and the man happened to be
carrying an umbrella.”
syntactic analysis will have to be capable of showing the
structural distinction between these underlying representations.