Introduction To Syntax
Introduction To Syntax
Morphosyntax
Overview
Sentences are not formed by simply stringing words.
They have hierarchical design in which words are
grouped together into successively larger structural
unit.
To analyze the sentences, it is easier to divide a
language into separate components.
A sentence consists of words.
S word+word+word+
The sentence consist of words that can only appear in
word order or in certain combinations to make it
grammatical.
The study of syntax aims to discover the grammatical
sentences, to describe, and analyze language in terms
of these rules.
The girl likes the apple vs The apple likes the girl.
Definition of Syntax
Immediate Constituents
Constituents are like building block which
pattern in certain ways to form larger &larger
units.
Each constituent (except the smallest) can be
broken down into its component parts.
Immediate Constituents (IC) analysis can be
done in morphology level (word & morpheme)
and syntactic level (word, phrase, and clause)
Some language experts, including Chomsky,
felt that IC analysis cannot show exactly the
relation between the component parts.
Chomsky brought up ideas that the
grammatical rules in producing sentence
should contain three major rules. Those are (1)
Phrase Structure rules (PS Rules) which
describe the parts and the relationship in
simple declarative sentence (kernel sentence),
(2) Transformational rules (T rules), and (3)
morphophonemic rules.