LINGUISTICS ENGL307

WEEK8

Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language

This is just a summary

Lesson Outline1. What is Syntax? + Some Notes about Syntax

2. The Rules of Syntax.

A. What are they and what do they do?

B. How to judge grammatical and non-grammatical sentences? 

3. Constituents and consistency test

a. What is constituent?

b. How to reveal the constituents of a sentence?

4. Syntactic Categories.

5. The difference between competence and performance.

6. Transitive and Intransitive Verbs. 

7. Sentence Relatedness.

What is the aim of this chapter

The aim of this chapter is to…

1. Show you what syntactic structure is.

2. What are the rules that determine syntactic structure are like.

Syntax

Syntax is the study of the part of the human linguistic

system that determines how sentences are put together

out of words. Syntactic rules in a grammar account for

the grammaticality of sentences, and the ordering of

words and morphemes.

Syntax

Syntax involves our knowledge of structural ambiguity, our knowledge that sentences may be paraphrases of

each other, and our knowledge of the grammatical function of each part of a sentence, that is, of the

grammatical relations.

Syntax

It is also concerned with speakers' ability to produce and

understand an infinite set of possible sentences. The

sentence is regarded the highest-ranking unit of

grammar, and therefore that the purpose of a

grammatical description is to define, making use of

whatever descriptive apparatus that may be necessary

(rules, categories, etc).

3. Functional Categories

Determiner (Det)

Demonstratives; this, that,

counting words; each, every

Articles , a and the

Auxiliary (Aux)

Have, had, be, was, were

Modals, may, might, can,

could

Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes  'competence' as an

idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual

utterances.   In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance

involves “doing” something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without

assessing performance.  

More Examples

A transitive verb has two characteristics. First, it is an action verb, expressing a doable activity

like kick, want, paint, write, eat, clean, etc. Second, it must have a direct object, something or someone who receives the action of the verb.

Alicia wrote a love poem on a restaurant napkin.

Wrote = transitive verb; poem = direct object.

More Examples

An intransitive verb has two characteristics. First, it is an action verb, expressing a doable activity like arrive, go, lie, sneeze, sit, die, etc.

Second, unlike a transitive verb, it will not have a direct object receiving the action.

In the evenings, Glenda sits on the front porch.

Sits = intransitive verb.

Syntactic Structure

As mentioned before, the grammar has a finite number of rules, but will be capable of generating an infinite number of well-formed structures. In this way the productivity of language would be captured within the grammar.The grammar should also be capable of revealing the basis of two other phenomena: 1st how some superficially different sentences are closely related and, 2nd how some superficially similar sentences are in fact different.

Two Superficially different sentences:

1. Charlie broke the window.2. The window was broken by Charlie.

Online Help

• More about Intransitive Verbs:http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/intransitiveverb.htm

• More about Transitive Verbs:http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/transitiveverb.htm

• Linguistics Competence and Performancehttp://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.Bilash/best%20of%20bilash/competencyperformance.html