SYNTAX

Subject : Linguistics
Lecturers :
1. Dr. Ani Nurweni, M.A
2. Ujang Suparman, M.A., Ph.D.

By :

Akbar Ali Mustofa (1923042015)

Ara Bella Pandora Vista (1923042016)

Retanisa Mentari (1923042031)

Widaty Prayoga Ningrahayu (1923042017)

ENGLISH EDUCATION MAGISTER

LAMPUNG UNIVERSITY

2019

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 PREFACE
First of all, the writer wants to express his thanks to Allah SWT, because
of His bless and grace, the entitled “Syntax” can be finished on time.
This paper is a requirement to fulfill the assignment from Dr. Ani
Nurweni, M.A and Ujang Suparman, M.A., Ph.D., the lecturers of linguistics
subject. The writer also thanks to him for all the guidance to complete it.
In completing this paper, the writer faced many problems, but with the
help of many people, all the problems could be passed. May Allah SWT give the
blessing for them. It provides definition, actual examples, relevance of syntax.
Although this paper has many deficiencies in the arrangement and explanation,
the writer hope that it can be used as a reference for the reader to understand ..

Bandar Lampung, August 28th, 2019

Writer

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

COVER ................................................................................................................ i
PREFACE ............................................................................................................ ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ..................................................................................... iii
1. INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................... 1
A. The Components of Grammars ................................................................ 1
2. CONTENT ....................................................................................................... 3
A. The Representations of Syntax ................................................................. 5
B. Examples of More Complex Syntactic Structures in language ................ 7
3. ACTUAL EXAMPLES AND CASES OF SYNTAX USES .......................... 9
4. RELEVANCE FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND LANGUAGE
TEACHERS ................................................................................................... 21
5. CONCLUSION .............................................................................................. 24
A. Conclusion .............................................................................................
BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 1. INTRODUCTION

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.

A finite number of rules facilitates an infinite number of sentences that can be

simultaneously understood by both the speaker and the listener.

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.

The rules of grammar do not have to be explicitly understood by the speaker of

the language or the listener.

The majority of native speakers of a language will have no formal knowledge of

the grammar of a language but are still capable of speaking the language
grammatically to a great degree of accuracy. Native speakers of a language
assimilate these rules subconsciously while the language is being learned as a
child.

The Components of Grammars

The grammar of a language has several components. These can be described as

follows:

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a) The phonetics that governs the structure of sounds;

b) The morphology that governs the structure of words;

c) The syntax, which governs the structure of sentences

d) The semantics that governs the meanings of words and sentences.

The word syntax derives from the Greek word syntaxis, which means
arrangement. Morphology deals with word formation out of morphemes; syntax
deals with phrase and sentence formation out of words.

The study of syntax in linguistics is quite challenging since the learner has to
know how to put words in a sentence to make it sensible and avoid ambiguity
(Smith, 2015). Many people know the meanings of many words, but it is difficult
to put the words in a sentence that makes grammatical and logical sense. A
sentence is supposed to communicate something to the listeners. Words arranged
in a sentence can give a particular meaning; the same words rearranged can give a
different message to the listeners. To become proficient in a language, syntax is
one of the most important aspects to be considered.

The choice of the topic on syntax is influenced by the difficulty that is

experienced while learning a foreign language (Smith, 2015). Most of the learners
of a language have problems in the topic of syntax than all other topics in the
study of any language. Syntax is the learner’s first attempt to understand creativity
in language and its limits. An English learner may know the meaning of
words football, take, watch and match, but the meaning of a message depends also
on the structure of a sentence. The learner may say, “Take me football match
watch.” This sentence is not acceptable as when one would try to figure out its
meaning, it might come out ambiguous. The learner has to know syntax to come
up with a sentence like “Take me out to watch the football match.” Syntax
soundness in a sentence makes the sentence easier to understand for the reader and
the listener and the message is passed on to the reader without any confusion.
Thus, people learning languages should take into consideration the use of syntax
(Yule, 2006).

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 2. CONTENT

Syntax is a part of linguistics that is involved in the study of sentence structure. It

is based on three elements of a sentence: word order, word agreement, and
hierarchical structure of a sentence (Hana, 2011). Learners of a language must
know how to arrange words which they know to make a sentence. If one wants
some books and knows that they are called books, a sentence may be constructed
as “Want these I books.” It is not grammatically correct, and the listener may not
understand the message. The words should be arranged as, “I want these books.”
A learner of a language should also ensure that there is word agreement in a
sentence; subject and verb, determiner and noun, and other words have to agree
between each other (Hana, 2011). The sentence “He want his ball” does not have
proper subject-verb agreement. The sentence “He wants his ball” is correct since
the subject is singular. The use of proper prepositions in a sentence is also
important; the learner should know which preposition agrees with the subject of a
sentence. A sentence like “I gave she a book” is not acceptable since the
preposition is wrong (Hana, 2011). Hierarchical structure of a sentence is also
very important. A good example is the following sentences: “We need focused
leaders” and “More leaders who are focused are needed”. The sentences have the
same meaning but different word arrangement (Hana, 2011).

Semantics deals with the meaning of words in a sentence. In its turn, Syntax
defines the meaning of the sentence. Some sentences can be grammatically
correct but make no sense; these sentences lack the correct use of syntax (Hana,
2011). A good example is a sentence like ‘Colorless red decisions sleep well.’
This sentence makes no sense, but it is grammatically correct, although the
agreement of words is not right. Some sentences make sense but are not
grammatically correct, as in a sentence like, “My big ball I will play today”. It
shows that the person will play his or her big ball today, but it is not
grammatically correct. The problem results from the lack of word order in the
sentence (Hana, 2011).

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Syntax is an aspect of linguistics that gives meaning to a sentence. Most sentences
are ambiguous when they lack syntax properties (Yule, 2006). One may construct
a sentence like, ‘John had a walking stick, and he bumped into an old man with
it’, and another person may construct a sentence like ‘John bumped into an old
man, and the old man happened to be carrying a walking stick’. These two
sentences would have the same meaning as the one initially constructed as ‘John
bumped into an old man with a walking stick’. It creates structural ambiguity; it is
open to diverse interpretations by the reader or the listener. The message could be
intended for various listeners and differential understanding of the sentence leads
to confusion. This shows that sentences that are not well structured could lead to
misunderstanding of the message. The main purpose of syntax in a sentence is to
show the structural distinction between the parties represented in a sentence
(Yule, 2006).

Syntax also enables learners to construct sentences that show recursion which is
important in the construction of grammatically correct sentences (Yule, 2006). It
enables the construction of one sentence from many phrases that relate to one
subject or object. A good example is in the description of the location of an
object. The sweet is on the floor, the sweet is near the door, and the sweet is in the
kitchen. These phrases shold be cobined to construct a complex sentence that the
reader or listenener should understand. The prepositional phrase has to be
repeated in the complex sentence, and the words must be well arranged to make
sense. Recursion and proper arrangement of the words will change the sentence
as, ‘The sweet is on the floor, near the door, and in the kitchen’. The insertion of a
sentence within another sentence also requires proper arrangement of the words to
make a grammatically correct and logical sentence (Yule, 2006). It would be less
tedious and time savin g to read one sentence other ythan two sentences to get the
same meaning. An example can be the following: ‘Ken saw Ian’ and ‘Joan knows
that Ken saw Ian.’ The first sentence is represented in the second one. One can get
the meaning of the first sentence from the second one, and this is use of
syntactical skills.

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There are many rules involved in the study of syntax, and the easiest way to
understand it is learning through the tree diagrams formed using the syntax rules.
Many people have used this method to learn a different language and they have
proved that it is successful. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2011).
Learners have to understand syntax rules to draw the tree. Without knowledge of
the rules, it can be difficult to understand them, but the rules help to make the
construction of sentences an easy task.

The Representations of Syntax

In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for

instance, for the following sentence:

"The boy kicked the ball"

The syntax can be described, by the following methods:

A statement of the correct sequence of the parts of speech (or Syntactic

Categories):

Subject is followed by verb is followed by object.

In the above example,

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

verb = "kicked"

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

by a series of transformational rules

For example:

Sentence  Noun Phrase + Verb Phrase

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Verb Phrase  Verb + Noun Phrase

Noun Phrase  Article + Noun Phrase

Where in the above example,

 Means “it transform into”

Verb phrase  “kicked the ball”

Noun phrase  “ the boy” “the ball”

By parsing diagrams

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:

Where:

Subject = “the boy”

(article + noun)

Verb = “kicked”

Object = “the ball”

(article + noun)

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

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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.

Examples of More Complex Syntactic Structures in language

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 follows:

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 .

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.

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:

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“scored a goal"

This could be represented as follows:

3. ACTUAL EXAMPLES AND CASES OF SYNTAX USES

If one wants some books and knows that they are called books, a sentence may be
constructed as “Want these I books.” It is not grammatically correct, and the
listener may not understand the message. The words should be arranged as, “I
want these books.” A learner of a language should also ensure that there is word
agreement in a sentence; subject and verb, determiner and noun, and other words
have to agree between each other (Hana, 2011). The sentence “He want his ball”
does not have proper subject-verb agreement. The sentence “He wants his ball” is
correct since the subject is singular. The use of proper prepositions in a sentence is
also important; the learner should know which preposition agrees with the subject
of a sentence. A sentence like “I gave she a book” is not acceptable since the
preposition is wrong (Hana, 2011). Hierarchical structure of a sentence is also
very important. A good example is the following sentences: “We need focused
leaders” and “More leaders who are focused are needed”. The sentences have the
same meaning but different word arrangement (Hana, 2011). Not only English,
other language also has its own syntax concept.

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Syntax variances between French and English
Words are put together to form sentence in different ways in different
languages. This area of investigation is referred to as ‘syntax’.
Syntacticians are interested in the sequences of the parts in a sentence. For
example, in English we say “there is a red apple” with the adjective ‘red’
coming before the noun ‘apple’, whereas in French, the sentence would be
“il y a une pomme rouge” where the adjective ‘rouge’ comes after the
noun ‘pomme’.

Syntax variances between Korean and English

Intensive English syntax study begins in middle school for Korean
students. Korean students begin to study the grammatical differences in
detail between Korean syntax (subject-object-verb) and English syntax
(subject-verb-object) (Shoebottom, 2004). This major difference in
sentence pattern becomes more challenging when students begin to learn
about morphemes that need to change in order to have proper subject-verb
agreement. Since Korean is a non-linear writing system, spelling is also a
difficult challenge as they learn English’s linear letter arrangement (Wang
et al., 2006). Most Korean words follow the consonant-vowel-consonant

letter position (e.g.,김/kim), where as English words can have consonant-

consonant-consonant-vowel letter position (e.g., THRee). This variance

also amplifies the pronunciation challenges Korean students have as they
learn complex English sound phonemes. Another contrast is the absence
of English morphemes like indefinite and definite articles ‘a’ and ‘the’.
Students struggle with the placement of ‘a’ and ‘the’ in English sentences
and often leave them out since there are no equivalent in Korean language
(Amuzie & Spinner, 2012). Korean students also struggle with vocabulary
usage, which is usually corrected with native English speaker help. Public
schools, private English academies and universities employ native English
speakers from around the world to expose students to Western culture.

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Syntax variances between Spanish and English
Because Spanish and English are Indo-European languages—the two have
a common origin from several thousand years ago from somewhere in
Eurasia—they are alike in ways that go beyond their shared Latin-based
vocabulary. The structure of Spanish isn't difficult for English speakers to
understand when compared with, for example, Japanese or Swahili.
Both languages, for example, use the parts of speech in basically the same
way. Prepositions (preposiciones) are called that, for instance, because
they are "pre-positioned" before an object. Some other languages have
postpositions and circumpositions that are absent in Spanish and English.
Even so, there are distinct differences in the grammars of the two
languages.

 Placement of Adjectives
One of the first differences you're likely to notice is that Spanish
descriptive adjectives(those that tell what a thing or being is like) typically
come after the noun they modify, while English usually places them
before. Thus we would say hotel confortable for "comfortable hotel" and
actor ansioso for "anxious actor."
Descriptive adjectives in Spanish can come before the noun—but that
changes the meaning of the adjective slightly, usually by adding some
emotion or subjectivity. For example, while an hombre pobre would be a
poor man in the sense of one not having money, a pobre hombre would be
a man who is poor in the sense of being pitiful. The two examples above
could be restated as confortable hotel and ansioso actor, respectively, but
the meaning might be changed in a way that isn't readily translated. The
first might emphasize the luxurious nature of the hotel, while the second
might suggest a more clinical type of anxiety rather than a simple case of
nervousness—the exact differences will vary with the context.
The same rule applies in Spanish for adverbs; placing the adverb before
the verb gives it a more emotional or subjective meaning. In English,

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 adverbs can often go before or after the verb without affecting the
meaning.
 Gender
The differences here are stark: Gender is a key feature of Spanish
grammar, but only a few vestiges of gender remain in English.
Basically, all Spanish nouns are masculine or feminine (there also is a
less-used neutergender used with a few pronouns), and adjectives or
pronouns must match in gender the nouns they refer to. Even inanimate
objects can be referred to as ella (she) or él(he). In English, only people,
animals, and a few nouns, such as a ship that can be referred to as "she,"
have gender. Even in those cases, the gender matters only with pronoun
use; we use the same adjectives to refer to men and women. (A possible
exception is that some writers differentiate between "blond" and "blonde"
based on gender.)
An abundance of Spanish nouns, especially those referring to occupations,
also have masculine and feminine forms; for example, a male president is
a presidente, while a female president is traditionally called a presidenta.
English gendered equivalents are limited to a few roles, such as "actor"
and "actress." (Be aware that in modern usage, such gender distinctions are
fading. Today, a female president might be called a presidente, just as
"actor" is now often applied to women.)
 Conjugation
English has a few changes in verb forms, adding "-s" or "-es" to indicate
third-person singular forms in the present tense, adding "-ed" or sometimes
just "-d" to indicate the simple past tense, and adding "-ing" to indicate
continuous or progressive verb forms. To further indicate tense, English
adds auxiliary verbs such as "has," "have," "did," and "will" in front of the
standard verb form.
But Spanish takes a different approach to conjugation: Although it also
uses auxiliaries, it extensively modifies verb endings to indicate person,
mood, and tense. Even without resorting to auxiliaries, which also are
used, most verbs have more than 30 forms in contrast with the three of

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 English. For example, among the forms of hablar (to speak) are hablo (I
speak), hablan (they speak), hablarás (you will speak), hablarían (they
would speak), and hables (subjunctive form of "you speak"). Mastering
these conjugated forms—including irregular forms for most of the
common verbs—is a key part of learning Spanish.
 Need for Subjects
In both languages, a complete sentence includes at least a subject and a
verb. However, in Spanish it is frequently unnecessary to explicitly state
the subject, letting the conjugated verb form indicate who or what is
performing the verb's action. In standard English, this is done only with
commands ("Sit!" and "You sit!" mean the same thing), but Spanish has no
such limitation.
For example, in English a verb phrase such as "will eat" says nothing
about who will be doing the eating. But in Spanish, it is possible to say
comeré for "I will eat" and comerán for "they will eat," to list just two of
the six possibilities. As a result, subject pronouns are retained in Spanish
primarily if needed for clarity or emphasis.
 Word Order
Both English and Spanish are SVO languages, those in which the typical
statement begins with a subject, followed by a verb and, where applicable,
an object of that verb. For example, in the sentence "The girl kicked the
ball," (La niña pateó el balón), the subject is "the girl" (la niña), the verb is
"kicked" (pateó), and the object is "the ball" (el balón). Clauses within
sentences also usually follow this pattern.
In Spanish, it is normal for object pronouns (as opposed to nouns) to come
before the verb. And sometimes Spanish speakers will even put the subject
noun after the verb. We'd never say something like "The book wrote it,"
even in poetic usage, to refer to Cervantes writing a book but the Spanish
equivalent is perfectly acceptable, especially in poetic writing: Lo escribió
Cervantes. Such variations from the norm are quite common in longer
sentences. For example, a construction such as "No recuerdo el momento

13
 en que salió Pablo" (in order, "I don't remember the moment in which left
Pablo") is not unusual.
Spanish also allows and sometimes requires the use of double negatives, in
which a negation must occur both before and after a verb, unlike in
English.
 Attributive Nouns
It is extremely common in English for nouns to function as adjectives.
Such attributive nouns come before the words they modify. Thus in these
phrases, the first word is an attributive noun: clothes closet, coffee cup,
business office, light fixture.
But with rare exceptions, nouns can't be so flexibly used in Spanish. The
equivalent of such phrases is usually formed by using a preposition such as
de or para: armario de ropa, taza para café, oficina de negocios, dispositivo
de iluminación.
In some cases, this is accomplished by Spanish having adjectival forms
that don't exist in English. For example, informático can be the equivalent
of "computer" as an adjective, so a computer table is a mesa informática.
 Subjunctive Mood
Both English and Spanish use the subjunctive mood, a type of verb used in
certain situations where the verb's action isn't necessarily factual.
However, English speakers seldom use the subjunctive, which is necessary
for all but basic conversation in Spanish.
An instance of the subjunctive can be found in a simple sentence such as
"Espero que duerma," "I hope she is sleeping." The normal verb form for
"is sleeping" would be duerme, as in the sentence "Sé que duerme," "I
know she is sleeping." Note how Spanish uses different forms in these
sentences even though English does not.
Almost always, if an English sentence uses the subjunctive, so will its
Spanish equivalent. "Study" in "I insist that she study" is in the subjunctive
mood (the regular or indicative form "she studies" isn't used here), as is
estudie in "Insisto que estudie."

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Syntax variances between Indonesia and English
Many languages spoken around the world share similarities in syntax,
grammar or even vocabulary because they share the same origins, such as
Dutch and German, Indonesian and Malaysian, or French and Spanish.
English and Indonesian, however, are worlds apart, having West Germanic
and Austronesian roots, respectively. Given the vastly different rules
separating the two, it can be quite challenging for a native speaker of
Indonesian to learn the ins and outs of the more complex English
language.
Syntax is the arrangement of words in a sentence, which is mostly the
same between English and Indonesian in simple phrases, but begins to
differ in questions and adjective phrases.

 Questions
English questions, for example, start with a question word (who, what,
when, why, where, how) followed by a verb and then subject; or in yes/no
questions, they begin with a verb followed by the subject:

WHAT ARE YOU EATING? / ARE YOU EATING?

In Indonesian, questions start with the subject:

KAMU MAKAN APA? / KAMU MAU MAKAN?

Meanwhile, adjective phrases in the two languages are in opposite order.
In English, the adjective comes before the noun, but in Indonesian, the
noun is mentioned first:

 Adjective Phrases
RED CAR / MOBIL MERAH
Meanwhile, adjective phrases in the two languages are in opposite order.
In English, the adjective comes before the noun, but in Indonesian, the
noun is mentioned first: red car / mobil merah

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 Verb Tenses
Bahasa Indonesia is relatively easy to learn because of its simple grammar
rules, particularly with regards to verb tenses – or the lack of it. Unlike
Indonesian, which uses the same verb for past, present and future
situations, English has 16 different tenses! It may take time to master all of
them, but it is not impossible!

 Passive and Active Form

While the passive voice is frequently used in Indonesian, English
sentences are stronger in the active form, especially when the focus is on
the object. For example, the sentence, “The last slice of cake was eaten by
my brother” seems more awkward and wordy than when it’s active: “My
brother eat the last slice of cake.”

 Plural Form
Once more, Bahasa Indonesia keeps it simple in the way it describes an
object of which there is more than one: merely repeat the work, as in buku
buku or anak anak; or add a plural determiner, such as banyak lukisan,
para penonton and sejumlah toko.

English plural forms are a bit more complicated. Firstly, they are divided
into two categories: regular and irregular nouns. The former simply gains
an -s or -es, like books, paintings, potatoes and glasses – that’s the easy
part.

Various things can happen to irregular plural nouns, from changes that are
slight (knife-knives, wolf-wolves, woman-women) and more complicated
(child-children, person-people, mouse-mice, foot-feet), to changes that are
rather odd (cactus-cacti, phenomenon-phenomena). And then there are
those that stay the same, such as sheep, deer, species and offspring.

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  Passive vs Active
Both English and Indonesian use the active and passive voice. But while
the passive voice is frequently used in Indonesian, English sentences are
stronger in the active form, especially when the focus is on the object. For
example, this sentence:

THE LAST SLICE OF CAKE WAS EATEN BY MY BROTHER.

seems more awkward and wordy than when it’s active:

MY BROTHER ATE THE LAST SLICE OF CAKE.

Syntax variances between Spanish and English

There are many differences between these two European languages, but
these are the 10 that tend to cause English speakers the most trouble when
learning Italian.

 Italian nouns have genders

English is one of the simplest European languages because all nouns have
the same articles. This means that English nouns are gender neutral, except
for nouns that refer specifically to a living creature that has a gender, such
as “hen” and “rooster.”

All Italian nouns are more complex, but for now we are going to focus on
the two primary genders, masculine singular and feminine singular.
(Italian also uses different articles for the plural versions of nouns, but if
you know the singular gender, you just need to remember to change the
article when you use the plural version of the noun.) Sometimes, the
gender of a noun is directly related to the gender of the thing it’s referring
to. More often, the gender is completely arbitrary, and it will require
memorizing the words and their genders.

Gender affects sentence construction, too. The article must match the
gender of the noun: the English word “the” is either masculine singular or

17
 feminine. Other parts of speech, including relative pronouns and
adjectives, must also match the gender of the noun.

For most native English-speakers, gender is one of the most complicated

new rules to grasp. Once you’ve gotten the gist of it, you’re well on your
way to mastering Italian grammar!

 Adjectives come after nouns

Something you don’t notice when speaking English is that you use the
adjectives first, giving the person the description of an object before they
know what the object is. For example, you can talk about the large, red
truck in English. In Italian, the adjectives come after the object, so you
would talk about the truck large red. That means that the person listening
to you will have an image of the object, and will then impose the
description over it.

There are a few exceptions to this rule that you might encounter because
some types of adjectives work differently. One example is a quantifier,
which is an adjective that describes how many of something there are. You
would say “the house blue,” but “the only house.” At least for now, focus
on learning to think of putting the adjective second. This will help you
start to speak a little faster with fewer obvious mistakes.

 Negation
In English, there are many prefixes that can be added to various words to
create the opposite of that word or negate its meaning. For example, there
is the difference between “efficient” and “inefficient” or “grateful” and
“ungrateful.” There are also negating words, like “no” and “not.” There
are right and wrong times to use all of these, and it can take years for
children to learn the proper use of these words.

18
 This is not a problem in Italian because you can negate any verb by simply
putting “no” before it. Also, Italian uses double-negatives as the default.
This is why “I don’t want nothing” is correct in Italian but not in English.

 Italian views some letters as foreign

English and Italian have the same alphabet, but Italian treats a few of
letters as outsiders. Largely, these are letters that were not used in Latin: j,
k, w, x, and y. Any word that includes these words in Italian are words that
were imported into the language – that means that you will not encounter
these letters very often because they do not appear naturally in Italian. This
will make it easier to spell because words that have these letters are often
going to be imported from English, so they will be spelled similar to (if
not exactly) like you see them in English.

 In Italian, there are five tenses

Compared to the minimum of 12 tenses in English (even that number is up
for debate, proving just how complicated our verbs are), Italian only have
five: simple past, present, imperfect, future, and conditional. To achieve
the same meaning as English tenses, Italian uses auxiliary words. It will
definitely be tricky in the beginning, but when you get the hang of it, you
may end up preferring it.

 In Italian, the verb “to have” can be used to express feeling

In English, we talk about feelings using some form of a “being” verb, like
“am.” In Italian, the verb for “to have” is often used instead. For example,
instead of saying “I am 20 years old,” a Italian-speaker would say “I have
20 years.” This is similar for many other traits, such as hunger (“I have
hunger”).

There’s a long list of words that use this construction. Keep an eye out for
the Italian verb for “to have” conjugations in your studies!

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 Italian has fewer prepositions
English relies heavily on prepositions to provide details in discussions
because we focus on describing where something is oriented in time and
space. For example, “The cat is sitting on top of the chair, and the dog is
sleeping under it.” While Italian certainly has prepositions, there are fewer
of them in Italian than there are in English. This can cause some ambiguity
for English speakers who are accustomed to more precise descriptions of
location.

A single Italian preposition can be used for several different prepositions

that we use in English, and it may take a while to learn when you can use a
particular preposition. Learning exactly what is meant by these
prepositions can be challenging for English speakers, but having fewer
words to choose from can also make it much easier to remember all of
them.

 Pronouns can often be omitted

In English, forming a proper sentence means always providing a subject
(with commands being the only exception).

Italian lets you assume what is the logical subject from context. For
example, to talk about your age you would say “have 20 years,” and it is
implied that “I” is the subject. This will definitely take a little time to get
used to, but ultimately, it can make things a lot easier.

 Emphasis is moved to the end of the sentence

One of the most frustrating aspects to learn as an English speaker is that
Italian does not have the same kinds of rules dictating sentence structure. It
is far more fluid and changeable than English, which means trying to
understand a native speaker can be almost painful in the beginning. Where
English relies on words for emphasis, Italian does it through restructuring
the sentence. The thing that a speaker wants to emphasis goes to the end of

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 the sentence, which means the structure changes on the point the speaker is
trying to make.

4. RELEVANCE FOR LANGUAGE LEARNERS AND LANGUAGE

TEACHERS

There is no form of communication that is as complex as the

human language. Speech is what connects humans around the world.
Although the languages speak are so diverse, the tone, inclinations and
connotations can be deciphered to understand ideologies and similarities
across certain languages and cultures.
Another issue that needs to be clear about is the effect that starting
to acquire a second language in childhood and starting to acquire a second
language in later life has on syntactic development (Hawkins, 2001). From
the available evidence it seems again that the course of syntactic
development is essentially the same, no matter what age one begins
acquiring a second language. For example, take some of the studies we
have already considered. In the acquisition of German word order, the
stages of development were the same in learners who started in adulthood
and in childhood. In the case of the acquisition of unstressed object clitic
pronouns in L2 French, similar stages of development have been found in
learners seven to eight years old, adolescents, and adults. In studies of the
acquisition of grammatical items, similar patterns of accuracy have been
found in children and adults. On the other hand, there appear to be two
areas where young child learners of second languages are importantly
different from adolescent and adult learners. Firstly, in initial stages of
acquisition they appear to develop more slowly than adolescents and
adults. Secondly, in the long run child L2 learners are normally ultimately
more successful than older L2 learners; their mental grammars do not
‘fossilize’ (stop short of becoming native like) in the way that older L2
learners’ mental grammars tend to. These factors are, however,
independent of the course of development.

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 Linguistics give the opportunity to learn how speech and sound
work. It can be learnt how sentences are structured, the power struggle in
open discourse, how we convey meanings in speech writing and how we
have the ability to learn multiple languages. This is why linguistic learning
is such a beneficial tool. There are some beneficial ways that have
relevances for language learners and language teachers as follows:
a. The teacher can ask the student to consider how formalor informal the
writing should be, and remind the student that all people adjust the
level of formality in oral conversation, depending on their listeners
and th speaking context.
b. The teacher can then help the students identify words in writing that
change the level of formality of the writing. To help students revise
boring, monotonous sentences, teachers might ask students to read
their writing aloud to partners. Thi strategy helps both the partner and
the writer to recognize when, for example, too many sentences begin
with "It is" or "There are." Both the partner and the writer can discuss
ways tovary the sentence beginnings. After the writer revises the
sentences, the partner can read the sentences aloud. Then both can
discuss the effectiveness of the revision.
c. Teachers can help students edit from passive voice to active voice by
presenting a mini lesson. In editing groups, students can exchange pap
ers and lookfor verbs that often signal the passive voice, such as was
and been. When students find these verbs, they read the sentence
aloud to their partners and discuss whether the voice is passive and,
if so, whether an active voice verb might strengthen the sentence.
The student writer can then decide which voice is most effective and
appropriate for the writing purpose and audience.
d. Teachers can help students become better proofreaders through peered
iting groups. Based on the writing abilities of their students, teachers
can assign different proofreading tasks to specific individuals in
each group. For example, one person in the group might proofread for
spelling errors, another person for agreement errors, another person

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 for fragments and runons and another person for punctuation errors.
As students develop increasing skill in proofreading, they become
responsible for more proofreading areas. Collaborating with
classmates in peer editing groups helps students improve their own
grammar skills as well as understand the importance of grammar
as a tool for effective communication.As teachers integrate grammar
instruction with writing instruction, they should use the
grammar terms that make sense to the students. By incorporating
grammar terms naturally into the processes of revising, editing,
and proofreading, teachers help students understand and apply
grammar purposefully to their ownwriting. Strategies such as writing
conferences, partnership writing, grammar mini lessons, and peer
response groups are all valuable methods for integrating grammar into
writing instruction

e. The writer thinks that by learning syntax,the students will know how
to combine some words to become meaningful sentence with correct
grammatical form.
f. The students will know types of words and phrases, therefore by
following the grammatical rules on making a sentence the students can
create grammatically correct sentence.
g. This is also happen to the writer when he joined foundation of
linguistics class. At first, the writer had difficulties in making good
sentence in good grammatical form, especially in
making an essay or paper.
h. However, by learning about syntax, the writer becomes
more understand on how to make good sentence in grammatical
forms because the writer know the syntactic structure of the sentence
and types of clause which form a sentence. The writer also knows the
types of sentence patterns, therefore it becomes easy to make a
sentence.

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a. Learn something new
We use speech every single day—you just have to get one croaky cough to
begin to value our ability to speak. Learning about how words are formed
(phonetics), or how we structure our sentences (syntax) are the first steps
in understanding the meanings into why we say certain things (semantics).
Humans are complicated beings and learning about how we communicate,
from writing to speaking, or even to how we sound, can give us more of an
insight into ourselves.
b. Improve communication skills
One of the biggest benefits is that we can improve our everyday
communication skills. From working out why a certain syntax is used, to
understanding the meaning behind how words are said, we can use the
basic elements of linguistics with every conversation we have. Whether
you’re public speaking and need to inspire and persuade, or you need to
write a speech for your brother’s wedding; building the confidence to
create the right balance of empathy in conversation is a vital skill to
master.
c. Improve critical thinking and analytical skills
You’ll be working with large amounts of data in all mediums, such as text,
video and audio. Being able to find the relevant information to analyze and
form conclusions is an impressive skill to have that’ll be beneficial in a
number of professions. Learning linguistics means you’ll be able to spot
patterns in speech and be able to decipher grammar fundamentals in
different languages.
d. Pathway to a new career
Learning how to solve puzzles from communication, or even creating
hypotheses from large amounts of data, can lead to a successful career not
only in linguistics. Solving puzzles in a professional manner can help in
large capacities of the police force, such as, forensic linguist, or as a
lawyer, in psychology and sociology. Good communication can help in
any field but especially in lexicography, HR, as a teacher, in editorial and
publishing or in management.

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 e. Innovation
Linguistics is fairly new in the realms of science so many hypotheses are
left unanswered. Linguists must tackle this by using creative strategies to
problem solve in order to discover new results. This means that, if you
take up this type of learning, you could help unlock new discoveries about
human brains. Learning more about how and why we interact the way we
do could be the most important benefit to this type of study, as there’s so
much left for us to discover.

5. CONCLUSION

Language enables communication; for people to communicate in a particular

language, they must construct correct and logical sentences in the language. The
most important task in learning a language is the arrangement of the words in
agreement with each other and prepositions to create a grammatical sentence that
makes sense. This skill is the syntax property.

Semantics, grammar, phonology, morphology, and syntax are all important

properties of the study of a language, and a good learner must know them all.
These aspects are not autonomous, and they must be studied together. The syntax
is a rule that governs the combination of words in a sentence to construct a correct
one. It also connects the combination of smaller units like phrases, clauses, and
small sentences into compound sentences. A learner who does not have a good
mastery of syntax properties of a language might end up constructing ambiguous
sentences that can be confusing to the listener.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hana, J. (2011). Intro to Linguistics – Syntax 1.Germany: Springer.Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hawkins, Rogers. (2001). A Framework for Studying Second Language Syntax.
Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Smith, J. (2015). What students say about linguistics: Why study syntax?
Retrieved August 28th, 2019 from https://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/
paper/3097
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2011). Philosophy of Linguistics.
Retrieved August 28th, 2019, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/
Yule, George. (2006). The Study of Language. Third Edition. United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.

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