Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language

1. Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Language Linguistics ENGL307 Week8 This is just a summary

2. 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.

3. What is the aim of this chapter The aim of this chapter is to… Show you what syntactic structure is. What are the rules that determine syntactic structure are like.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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).

8. 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.  

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Two Superficially different sentences: Charlie broke the window. The window was broken by Charlie.

14. 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