Syntax

1. Syntax

2. Syntax is that branch of grammar which is concerned with the study of the arrangement of word in sentences and of the means by which such relations as inflections and word order etc are shown. • It is the study in which the words are arranged together in order to make larger units.

3. Syntax is the grammar of sentences; it is the study of sentence construction. • Richards et al(1985) define syntax as the study, “ how words combine to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences’ . • Sentence may be analyzed

4. Segmentally into phonological unit-----------phonemes and syllables • Morphological units ---------morphemes and words • Syntactic units------------phrases and clauses • Syntactic Processes • The syntactic analysis of a language requires some fundamental issues: • a ) the understanding of the patterns which underlie sentences, • b )the knowledge of the manners and means of connecting linguistic constituents and • c) the idea of the rules of transforming structure from one type into another.

5. Discontinuous constituents: • It is a part of sentences. • Belong to the same constituents but are separated by other constituents. • Recursion: • Recursion means re-occurance.When a constituent, which has been written by being used to the left of rewriting symbol, is used in the same or later rule to the right of the rewriting symbol, the rule is known as recursion.

6. Conjoining: • Conjoining occurs when some elements are added to other similar elements by using coordinators, for example • The picture is enjoyable • The picture is interesting • Embedding: • Embedding happens in the cases in which the subordinate clause is embedded in the main clause. For exp: The boy who spoke to you is my brother.

7. IC analysis • Immediate constituent analysis-method to analyzing a sentence linguistically • IC---the analysis of a sentence into its immediate constituents. Sentence---IC • Its aim is to find out the ultimate constitute of a sentence and their relationship with one another. The ultimate constituents are the smallest meaningful unit which can be broken down –a morpheme at the morphological level and a word at the syntactic level.

8. S.K Verma defines the term, IC analysis discover how units are layered in sentences, each lower level constituent being part of a higher level constituent. • The term was introduced by Bloomfield in 1939. • For exp: Poor John ran away. • A sentence is seen not as a sequence or a string of elements but as being made up of layers of constituents.

9. Transformational Generative Grammar: • The Theory was propounded by Chomsky. • It tries to demonstrate with a system of rules the knowledge which a native speaker of a language uses in forming any and all grammatical sentences and rejecting ungrammatical ones. • A TG consists of a syntactic component, a semantic component and a phonological component.

10. Deep structure and Surface structure: According to TG Grammar, each sentence is considered to possess two levels of structure: the deep structure in the speaker’s, writer’s and hearer’s or reader’s mind and the ‘surface structure ‘which a person speaks, hears, reads and writes. The surface structure is the output of the transformational rules, and the input to the phonological rules. • It is easy to please Rifat. • Pleasing Rifat is easy.