Syntax: The Sentence Patterns
of Language
LINGUISTICS
ENGL307
WEEK8
Lesson Outline
1. What is Syntax? + Some Notes about Syntax
2. The Rules of Syntax.
A. What are they and what do they do?
B. How to judge grammatical and non-grammatical sentences?
3. Constituents and consistency test
a. What is constituent?
b. How to reveal the constituents of a sentence?
4. Syntactic Categories.
5. The difference between competence and performance.
6. Transitive and Intransitive Verbs.
7. Sentence Relatedness.
What is the aim of this chapter
The aim of this chapter is to…
1.
Show you what syntactic structure is.
2. What are the rules that determine syntactic
structure are like.
Syntax
Syntax is the study of the part of the human linguistic
system that determines how sentences are put together
out of words. Syntactic rules in a grammar account for
the grammaticality of sentences, and the ordering of
words and morphemes.
Syntax
Syntax involves our knowledge of structural ambiguity,
our knowledge that sentences may be paraphrases of
each other, and our knowledge of the grammatical
function of each part of a sentence, that is, of the
grammatical relations.
Syntax
It is also concerned with speakers' ability to produce and
understand an infinite set of possible sentences. The
sentence is regarded the highest-ranking unit of
grammar, and therefore that the purpose of a
grammatical description is to define, making use of
whatever descriptive apparatus that may be necessary
(rules, categories, etc).
Demonstratives;
this, that, counting
words; each, every
Determiner (Det)
Articles , a and
the
3. Functional
Categories
Have, had, be,
was, were
Auxiliary (Aux)
Modals, may,
might, can, could
Chomsky separates competence and performance; he
describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is
located as a psychological or mental property or
function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual
utterances. In short, competence involves “knowing”
the language and performance involves “doing”
something with the language. The difficulty with this
construct is that it is very difficult to assess
competence without assessing performance.
More Examples
A transitive verb has two characteristics. First, it is an
action verb, expressing a doable activity like kick, want,
paint, write, eat, clean, etc. Second, it must have a
direct object, something or someone who receives the
action of the verb.
Alicia wrote a love poem on a restaurant napkin.
Wrote = transitive verb; poem = direct object.
More Examples
An intransitive verb has two characteristics. First, it
is an action verb, expressing a doable activity like arrive,
go, lie, sneeze, sit, die, etc. Second, unlike a transitive
verb, it will not have a direct object receiving the action.
In the evenings, Glenda sits on the front porch.
Sits = intransitive verb.
Syntactic Structure
As mentioned before, the grammar has a finite number of
rules, but will be capable of generating an infinite number of
well-formed structures. In this way the productivity of
language would be captured within the grammar.
The grammar should also be capable of revealing the basis of
two other phenomena: 1st how some superficially different
sentences are closely related and, 2nd how some superficially
similar sentences are in fact different.
Two Superficially different sentences:
1. Charlie broke the window.
2. The window was broken by Charlie.
Online Help 
• More about Intransitive Verbs:
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/intransitiveverb.htm
• More about Transitive Verbs:
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/transitiveverb.htm
• Linguistics Competence and Performance
http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.Bilash/best
%20of%20bilash/competencyperformance.html