syntax resume (morphology)

Summary of syntax(morphology)

Definition of syntax

Language has often been characterized as a systematic correlation between certain types of gestures and meaning. It is not the case that every possible meaning that can be expressed is correlated with a unique, unanalyzable gesture, be it oral or manual. Rather, each language has stock of meaning-bearing elements and different ways of combining them to express different meaning, and these ways of combining them are themselves meaningful.(Robert and Valin, 2001).

Basically, syntax is the rules by which signs are combined to make statements. If you consider the words of a language to be its signs, then its syntax is the rules which put signs together to make statements, ask questions, and produce other utterances.

Syntax incorporates the grammar of phrases, clauses, and sentences. Producing and uttering sentences is an important part of how we make sense of our world. We articulate the meaning of our experience in words; in the process of articulate, we make (or discover) the meaning of the experience. This process is similar to the ways in which we intrepret literature.

The syntax the exact structure of what we write is an essential part of its meaning. Change the structure and you have changed the meaning, at least slightly.

Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.   (Chomsky, 2002)

A few years ago, I was on Miami Beach. Along with the ocean breeze, there was the odor of exhaust from jet-skiers who were buzzing around just beyond the surf, coming close to swimmers and small craft. The juxtaposition of the two smells impressed me strongly. Since I'm inclined to express meaningful experiences in writing, I produced the following haiku:

sea breeze

carrying the fumes

of jet-ski exhaust

Syntax involves the study of how constituents are grouped and ordered. Constituents can be identified through a series of tests. In the sentence The woman wrote lots of letters, The woman is a constituent because it can be pronominalized (She wrote lots of letters) and moved when the sentence is converted into the passive voice (Lots of letters were written by the woman). Constituents can be defined either notionally or formally. Constituents can also be described in terms of their linear and hierarchical structure, and the particular form and function that they have in a clause.

Although syntax is a discrete and separate level of linguistic structure, the discussion of adverbials at the end of the previous section indicates that it is often hard to discuss a specific syntactic category without making reference to the particular meaning that the category exhibits. The study of meaning is known as semantics, a topic that will be considered in detail in the next chapter. p.146

Paradigms and morphosyntax

A linguistic paradigm is the complete set of related word forms associated with a given lexeme. The familiar examples of paradigms are the conjugations of verbs, and the declensions of nouns. Accordingly, the word forms of a lexeme may be arranged conveniently into tables, by classifying them according to shared inflectional categories such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender or case. For example, the personal pronouns in English can be organized into tables, using the categories of person (first, second, third); number (singular vs. plural); gender (masculine, feminine, neuter); and case (nominative, oblique, genitive).

The inflectional categories used to group word forms into paradigms cannot be chosen arbitrarily; they must be categories that are relevant to stating the syntactic rules of the language. For example, person and number are categories that can be used to define paradigms in English, because English has grammatical agreement rules that require the verb in a sentence to appear in an inflectional form that matches the person and number of the subject. In other words, the syntactic rules of English care about the difference between dog and dogs, because the choice between these two forms determines which form of the verb is to be used. In contrast, however, no syntactic rule of English cares about the difference between dog and dog catcher, or dependent and independent. The first two are nouns and the second two are adjectives – and they generally behave like any other noun or adjective behaves.

An important difference between inflection and word formation is that inflected word forms of lexemes are organized into paradigms, which are defined by the requirements of syntactic rules, whereas the rules of word formation are not restricted by any corresponding requirements of syntax. Inflection is therefore said to be relevant to syntax, and word formation is not. The part of morphology that covers the relationship between syntax and morphology is called "morphosyntax" and concerns itself with inflection and paradigms but not with word formation or compounding.

Point

  Syntax concerns the possible arrangements of words in a language. The basic unit is the sentence which minimally consists of a main clause (containing at least a subject and predicate). Nouns and verbs are the major categories and combine with various others, such as adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. to form more complex sentences.