SYNTAX
PART 1 : PHRASES
WHAT IS
“SYNTAX”?
- Knowing a
language includes the ability to construct phrases and sentences out of
morphemes and words. The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s
knowledge of these structures and their formation is called “syntax”.-
- In other
words, syntax is the study of sentence patterns of language.
- The aim of
this study is to show you what syntactic structure is and what the rules that
determine syntactic structure are like.
What meant by “structure”
here is word order.
The meaning of a
sentence depends on the order in which words occur in a sentence.
Compare the
following sentences
- I am happy because I sing.
- I sing because I am happy.
The two
sentences above have the same categories and number of words, but
different in structure (words order); thus, they have different meanings.
SYNTACTIC
CATEGORY
- Syntactic
category is a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a
significant number of common characteristics.
Syntactic
categories commonly include:
1. Parts of Speech: (Determiner,
Adjective, Noun, Pronoun, Preposition, Adverb, Auxiliary, Verb), etc;
2. Phrase Structure Grammar:
(Noun Phrase, Adjective Phrase, Verb Phrase, Adverb
Phrase, Preposition Phrase); and
3. Sentence,
as the core of the structure.
- The syntactic
categories are illustrated in a tree diagram called phrase structure tree,
by supplying the name of the syntactic category of each word grouping.
These names are
often referred to as syntactic labels (usually written by the initials of the categories),
such as:
- Determiner : Det
- Adjective : Adj
- Adverb : Adv
- Noun :N
- Verb :V
- Pronoun : Pro
- Preposition : P Labels Syntactic
- Auxiliary Verb : Aux
- Preposition Phrase : PP
- Adverb Phrase : Adv P
- Adjective Phrase : Adj P
- Noun Phrase : NP
- Verb Phrase : VP
- Dealing with
the phrase structure grammar as a part of syntactic category, it is
important to comprehend the concepts of:
Noun
Phrase (NP),
Adjective
Phrase (AdjP),
Verb
Phrase (VP),
Adverb
Phrase (AdvP), and
Preposition
Phrase (PP).
But first of
all, let us see what the definition of PHRASE is.
PHRASE
- A phrase
is a sequence of words or a group of words arranged in a grammatical
construction, and functions as a unit in a sentence.
- There are five
commonly occurring types of phrase. They are:
* Noun Phrase (NP);
*
Adjective Phrase (AdjP);
*
Verb Phrase (VP)
* Adverb Phrase (AdvP); and
*
Preposition Phrase (PP).
A. NOUN PHRASE
A noun phrase refers to
a phrase that built upon a noun which functions as the headword of the phrase.
Example:
1. The young man threw the old dog
a bone.
(NP) (NP) (NP)
2. Pretty girls whispered softly.
(NP)
B. ADJECTIVE
PHRASE
An adjective
phrase refers to a phrase that modifies a noun. It built upon an adjective
which functions as the headword of the phrase.
Examples:
1. She seemed extremely pleasant.
(Adj. P)
2. You are much quicker than
I.
(Adj. P)
C. VERB PHRASE
A verb phrase
refers to a phrase that composed of at least one verb and the dependents of the
verb, in which the verb functions as the headword of the phrase.
Examples:
1. He has been singing.
(VP)
2. The child found the puppy.
(VP)
D. ADVERB PHRASE
An adverb
phrase refers to a phrase that often plays the role of telling us when,
where, why, or how an event occurred, in which the adverb functions as the
headword of the phrase.
Examples:
1. We are expecting him to come next
year.
(Adv.P)
2. He ran very quickly.
( Adv.P)
E. PROPOSITION
PHRASE
A preposition
phrase refers to a phrase that begins with a preposition, in which the
preposition functions as the headword of the phrase.
Examples:
1. He arrived by plane.
(PP)
2. Do you know that man with the
scar?.
(PP)
PHRASE STRUCTURE
TREE
- Phrase
structure tree (also called constituent structure tree), is a tree diagram with
syntactic category information provided. A phrase structure tree shows that a
sentence is both linear string of words and a hierarchical structure
with phrases nested in phrases (combination of phrase structures).
- A phrase
structure tree is a formal device for representing speaker’s knowledge about
phrase structure in speech.
For instance, we
can make the phrase structure tree to the following sentence: “The child found the puppy”
The child found
the puppy
the child found
the puppy
NP VP
the child found
the puppy
Det N V
NP
the
puppy Det N
- The phrase
structure tree above is correct, but it is redundant;
The word “child” is repeated three
times;
The word “puppy” is repeated four
times; and so on.
- We can
streamline the tree by writing the words only once at the bottom of the
diagram.
Thus, the phrase
structure tree of the sentence above can be shown as follow:
NP
VP
Det N
V NP
the child
found
Det N
the puppy
In the
simplified version of phrase structure tree above, no information is lost.
The syntactic
category of each individual word appears immediately above that word. In this
way, “the” is shown to be a Determiner; “child” is a Noun, and so on.
BASIC PHRASE
STRUCTURE RULES
1.
S → NP VP
2.
NP → (Det) (Adj) N (PP)
3.
VP → V (NP) (PP) (Adv)
4.
PP → P NP
1. S → NP VP
NP VP
2. NP → (Det) N
Det N
3. VP → V (PP)
Det N V
PP
4. PP → P NP
Example:
NP
VP
Det N
V PP
V NP
Det N
Det N
V PP
P NP
Det N
The boat sailed
up the river
The girl laughed
at the monkey
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