AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH SYNTAX

Compiled By: Samsul Amri, [Link]

What is Syntax?
In Morphology, morphemes are the building blocks that go to make up words. But English
is not just a collection of words. Words are put together to form sentences. The way in which words
are put together to form sentences is called the syntax of the language.
In linguistics, syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of
sentences (sentence structure) in a given language, usually including word order. The term syntax
is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is
to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages. In short, syntax is the way how the words
are put together to form phrases and sentences. In other words, syntax is the study of the structure of
sentences. To study syntax is to study the patterns and relationship of words, phrases and clauses.
Syntax attempts to uncover the underlying principles, or rules for constructing well-formed
sentences.

Syntax or syntactic analysis may be defined as:

1. Determining the relevant component parts of a sentence
2. Description these parts grammatically
The components parts of a sentence are called constituents. In other words, syntax involves the two
closely related tasks of:
1. Breaking down the sentence into its constituents
2. Assigning some grammatical label to each constituents, stating way type of constituents (or
grammatical category) it is and what grammatical function it has.

This definition of syntax implies that we start from what is regarded as the largest unit of syntactic
description – the sentence – and proceed until we arrive at the smallest meaningful unit. This is
called a ‘top to bottom’ analysis. The units smallest then the sentence will be referred to as clauses,
phrases, words and morphemes respectively. However, instead of saying that a sentence can be
broken down into smaller and smaller constituents, we might also look at the sentence the other way
round – that is, “from bottom to top” – and say that constituents at different levels can combine to
form increasingly larger units: we proceed then from the morpheme to the sentence as a whole.
Constituents are like building blocks which pattern in certain ways to form larger to larger units, the
largest unit being the sentence. Each constituent (except the smallest) can be broken down into its
components parts. The purpose of doing syntax is to discover the ways in which constituents
combine to form the structure of sentence.
Sentence Clause Phrase Words Morpheme
The diagram represents the hierarchical scale of constituents. The four double-pointed arrows in the
diagram indicate that it may be read “from left to right” or “from right to left.”

Why Do We Study Syntax and What Is It Good for?

There are many reasons for studying syntax, from general humanistic or behavioral motivations to
much more specific goals such as those in the following:
1) To help us to illustrate the patterns of English more effectively and clearly.
2) To enable us to analyze the structure of English sentences in a systematic and explicit way.
For example, let us consider how we could use the syntactic notion of head, which refers to the
essential element within a phrase. In English, the main verb agrees with the head element of the
subject (subject-verb agreement).

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Some Remarks on the Essence of Human Language
One of the crucial functions of any human language, such as English or Korean, is to convey
various kinds of information from the everyday to the highly academic. Language provides a means
for us to describe how to cook, how to remove cherry stains, how to understand English grammar,
or how to provide a convincing argument. We commonly consider certain properties of language to
be key essential features from which the basic study of linguistics starts.

The first well-known property (as emphasized by Ferdinand de Saussure 1916) is that there is no
motivated relationship between sounds and meanings. This is simply observed in the fact that
the same meaning is usually expressed by a different sounding-word in a different language (think
of /house, maison, casa/, /bridge, hashi, ponte/). For words such as hotdog, sweetbread, their
meanings have nothing to do with their shapes. For example, the word hotdog has no relationship
with a dog which is or feels hot. There is just an arbitrary relationship between the word’s sound
and its meaning: this relationship is decided by the convention of the community the speakers
belong to.

The rules of syntax combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences. Among other things,
the rules determine the correct word order for a language. For example, English is a Subject–Verb–
Object (SVO) language.

1. The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice.

2. *President the Supreme new justice Court a nominated.
The English sentence in (1) is grammatical because the words occur in the right order; the sentence
in (2) is ungrammatical because the word order is incorrect for English. (Recall that the asterisk or
star preceding a sentence is the linguistic convention for indicating that the sentence is
ungrammatical or ill-formed according to the rules of the grammar.)
Other important role of the syntax is to describe the relationship between the meaning of a
particular group of words and the arrangement of those words. For example, the word order of a
sentence contributes crucially to its meaning. The sentences in (3) and (4) contain the same words,
but the meanings are quite different.
3. I mean what I say.
4. I say what I mean.

Then, other important feature of language, and one more central to syntax, is that language makes
infinite use of finite set of rules or principles, the observation of which led the development of
generative linguistics in the 20th century (cf. Chomsky 1965). A language is a system for combining
its parts in infinitely many ways. One piece of evidence of the system can be observed in word-
order restrictions. If a sentence is an arrangement of words and we have 5 words such as man, ball,
a, the, and kicked, how many possible combinations can we have from these five words? More
importantly, are all of these combinations grammatical sentences? Mathematically, the number of
possible combinations of 5 words is 5! (factorial), equaling 120 instances. But among these 120
possible combinations, only 6 form grammatical English sentences:
(5)
a. The man kicked a ball.
b. A man kicked the ball.
c. The ball kicked a man.
d. A ball kicked the man.
e. The ball, a man kicked.
f. The man, a ball kicked.
All the other 114 combinations, a few of which are given in (6), are unacceptable to native speakers
of English. We use the notation * to indicate that a hypothesized example is ungrammatical.

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(6)
a. *Kicked the man the ball.
b. *Man the ball kicked the.
c. *The man a ball kicked.

It is clear that there are certain rules in English for combining words. These rules constrain which
words can be combined together or how they may be ordered, sometimes in groups, with respect to
each other. Such combinatory rules also play important roles in our understanding of the syntax of
an example like (7a). Whatever these rules are, they should give a different status to (7b), an
example which is judged ungrammatical by native speakers even though the intended meaning of
the speaker is relatively clear and understandable.
(7)
a. Kim lives in the house Lee sold to her.
b. *Kim lives in the house Lee sold it to her.

The requirement of such combinatory knowledge also provides an argument for the assumption that
we use just a finite set of resources in producing grammatical sentences, and that we do not just rely
on the meaning of words involved. Consider the examples in (8):
(8)
a. *Kim fond of Lee.
b. Kim is fond of Lee.
Even though it is not difficult to understand the meaning of (8a), English has a structural
requirement for the verb is as in (8b).
A related part of this competence is that a language speaker can produce an infinite number of
grammatical sentences. For example, given the simple sentence (9a), we can make a more complex
one like (9b) by adding the adjective tall. To this sentence, we can again add another adjective
handsome as in (9c). We could continue adding adjectives, theoretically enabling us to generate an
infinitive number of sentences:
(9)
a. The man kicked the ball.
b. The tall man kicked the ball.
c. The handsome, tall man kicked the ball.
d. The handsome, tall, nice man kicked the ball.
e. . . .
One might argue that since the number of English adjectives could be limited, there would be a
dead-end to this process. However, no one would find themselves lost for another way to keep the
process going (cf. Sag et al. 2003):
(10)
a. Some sentences can go on.
b. Some sentences can go on and on.
c. Some sentences can go on and on and on.
d. Some sentences can go on and on and on and on.
e. . . .
To (10a), we add the string and on, producing a longer one (10b). To this resulting sentence (10c),
we once again add and on. We could in principle go on adding without stopping: this is enough to
prove that we could make an infinite number of well-formed English sentences.

Our syntactic knowledge crucially includes rules that tell us how words form groups in a sentence,
or how they are hierarchically arranged with respect to one another. Consider the following
sentence:

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The captain ordered all old men and women off the sinking ship.
This phrase old men and women is ambiguous, referring to either old men and to women of any age
or to old men and old women. The ambiguity arises because the words old men and women can be
grouped in two ways. If the words are grouped as follows, old modifies only men and so the women
can be of any age.
[old men] and [women]
When we group them like this, the adjective old modifies both men and women.
[old [men and women]]
The rules of syntax allow both of these groupings, which is why the expression is ambiguous. The
following hierarchical diagrams, also called tree diagrams, illustrate the same point:

old men and women old men and women

In the first structure old and men are under the same node and hence old modifies men. In the
second structure old shares a node with the entire conjunction men and women, and so modifies
both.

EXERCISE
Check or find out whether each of the following examples is grammatical or ungrammatical. For
each ungrammatical one, provide at least one (informal) reason for its ungrammaticality, according
to your intuitions or ideas.
a. Kim and Sandy is looking for a new bicycle.
b. The boy jumped into a green car.
c. I enjoy to travel abroad by myself.
d. Chris must liking syntax.
e. She decided getting married at 25.
f. Which chemical did you mix the hydrogen peroxide and?
g. There seem to be a good feeling developing among the students.
h. “I” is a subject pronoun.

REFERENCES

Erlinda, R. (2010). Linguistics for English Language Teaching: Sounds, Words, and Sentences.
Batusangkar: STAIN Batusangkar Press.

Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2014). An Introduction to Language (10th Ed.). Boston:
Michael Rosenberg.

Kim, Jong-Bok and Peter Sells. (2008). English Syntax: An Introduction. Center for The Study of
Language and Information.

Wekker, Herman and Liliane Haegeman. (1989). A modern Course in English Syntax. London:
Routledge