Syntax

Basic Terminology

A.MIMOUNI
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.
 Syntax
Syntax is a branch of linguistics
which studies the structure of
sentences and the grammatical
rules governing the way words
are combined to form sentences.

A. Mimouni
Syntax is the study of sentence structure
• « Sentence can be defined as the maximal unit of syntax or the
largest unit over which constructional relations hold….. The
sentence is the domain of rules which specify that certain
combinations of words are grammatical and certain others are
ungrammatical » (Mathews 1990:29-45)
• Structure refers to the way related parts are arranged/ organized
together forming a whole

A. Mimouni
Universal Grammar
• Grammars are alike in fundamental ways
• Goal of syntactic study: find universal principles and language-
specific parameters
Productivity
• We do not store whole sentences, but the words (mental lexicon)
and the rules that combine them
• The set of rules is finite, but the set of possible sentences is not
 Lexical Categories

Verb, Noun, Adjective, Adverb, Determiner, Preposition, Coordinator, Subordinator, Interjection

Lexical Category (also called parts of speech) are the basic types of words that make up a language. Each category
shares certain grammatical properties and functions within a sentence.
Verb He is ill. She left early. We want to help.

Noun The dog barked. Sue won easily. I love books.

Adjective He's very young. I've got a sore knee. It looks easy.

Adverb She spoke clearly. You're extremely fit. He works very hard.

Determiner The dog barked. I've got a sore knee. We need some milk.

Preposition He's in the garden. It's from your uncle. We went to Paris.

We saw Kim and Pat. Hurry or we'll be late. It's cheap but good.
Coordinator

Subordinator I know that it's true. Ask whether it's true. I wonder if it's true.

Interjection Wow! Ah! Hello!

• Sentences have subjects (NP) and predicates (VP).
• • Constituents are groups of words that function as units.
• • Example: [The student] [wrote an essay].
 Syntactic Constructions
A phrase is a group of words functioning as a single unit within a sentence.

• Verb phrase She [wrote some letters]. He [is still in London].

• Noun phrase [The new lodger] is here. [The boss] wants to see [you].
• Adjective phrase It's getting [rather late]. I'm [glad you could come].
• Adverb phrase speak [too soon]. It's [quite extraordinarily] good.
• Preposition phrase They're [in the garden]. He wrote a book [on sharks].

Each type is named after the main word (the “head”) of the phrase, which determines its grammatical function.

A. Mimouni
Syntactic Construction
External Syntax of a construction Internal Syntax of a construction

• The properties of the construction • A description of the

as a whole (anything speakers construction’s « make-up ».
know about the construction that
is relevant to the larger syntactic
contexts it which it is welcome • Mary ate an apple
• Mary ate an apple (Clausal Type) Subject + Verb + Object
• This edition (Phrasal Type) • This edition
Determiner+ Noun

A. Mimouni
Syntactic Construction
External Syntax of a construction Internal Syntax of a construction
• The old fence • The old fence
Phrasal type: NP D + Adj + N
• In the park • In the park
Phrasal type: PP Prep+ D+ N
• Very ugly • Very ugly
Phrasal type: AdjP Int + Adj
• Made a mess • Made a mess
Phrasal type: VP V + D+ N
• That he is telling the truth • That he is telling the truth
Clausal type: CompP Comp+ Subject+ aux+ V + Object

A. Mimouni
 Syntactic function

• It shows the relationship between a linguistic form and other parts of

the linguistic pattern in which it is used.
• Names of function are expressed in terms of subjects, objects,
predicators, modifiers, complements, etc.

A. Mimouni
• Subjects: How can we define subjects?
In some languages, subject refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case

Latin:
a) Pater filium amat (the father
loves the son)
b) Patrem filius amat ( the son
loves the father)
English:
a) John was bitten by a dog
b) John underwent major heart
surgery

A. Mimouni
 The expressions
« the doer of the
Subjects action » and « the
English: person or thing acted
upon by the doer »
The subject is often said to be the doer of the identify semantic
action, while the object is the person or thing roles « agent » and
acted upon by the does. « patient ».
The definition works for (a) and (b)
a) Mary slapped John
b) A dog bit John
The definition does not work for (c) and (d)
a) John was bitten by a dog
b) John underwent major heart surgery
A. Mimouni
Subjects
• To account for the case of subject in passive voice, we have another
term « Grammatical Subject »

John was bitten by a dog

Grammatical
Logical subject
subject

A. Mimouni
 Subjects

• Another traditional definition of the subject is « what the sentence is

about » (i.e., topic)
a) Bill is a very crafty fellow.
b) (Jack is pretty relaiable, but) Bill I don’t trust.
c) As for Bill, I wouldn’t take his promises very seriously.

Bill is the topic of all three sentences. Yet, Bill is the

subject in (a), the object in (b), and neither subject nor
object in (c)

A. Mimouni
Subjects
• It seems that we cannot reliably identify the subject of a sentence with
either the agent or the topic.
• Rather, we use grammatical criteria to develop a workable definition.
• Subjects have some properties in English
a. Word Order
b. Pro-forms
c. Agreement
d. Content Questions
e. Tag Questions

A. Mimouni
Subjects
a. Word order:
Subjects ordinarily precedes the verb in statement

a) Sally collects stamps

b) *Collects Sally stamps

A. Mimouni
Subjects
b. Pro-forms:
The first and third person pronouns in English appear in special form
when the pronoun is a subject. The forms are not used when the
pronoun occurs in other positions

a) He loves me
b) I love him
c) We love them
d) They hate us
A. Mimouni
Subjects
c. Agreement with verb:
In present simple tense, an –s is added to the verb when a third person
subject is singular. However, the verb remains unaffected by the number
and person of the object.

a) She pushes him

b) They push him
c) She pushes them

A. Mimouni
Subjects
d. Content questions
✓If the subject is replaced by a question word (who/what), the rest of the
sentence remains unchanged.
✓But when any other element of the sentence is replaced by a question
word, an auxiliary verb must appear before the subject

a) John stole a painiting from the muesum

b) Who stole a painiting from the muesum?
c) What did John steal from the muesum?
A. Mimouni
Subjects
e. Tag questions:
Tag questions are questions used to seek confirmation of a statement.
✓Tag questions always contain a pronoun that refers to the subject and
never to any other element in the sentence.

a) John loves Mary, doesn’t he?

b) Mary loves John, doesn’t she?
c) *John loves Mary, doesn’t she?

A. Mimouni
Predicate
The predicate refers to a major constituent of sentence structure in a
binary analysis in which obligatory constituents other than the subject are
considered together.
It usually expresses actions, processes, and states that refer to the subject.
a) The boy is running
b) Peter broke the glass
c) Jame must be mad!

A. Mimouni
• Objects:
Since traditionally, subject can be defined as the doer of the action, object
may refer to the « receiver » or « goal » of an action. It is further classified
into Direct Object and Indirect Object

a) Mother bought a doll

b) Mother gave DO (my sister) ID (a In some langauges, object is
doll) marked by case labels: the
accusative case for direct
object, and the dative case for
indirect object

A. Mimouni
• Objects:

In English, « Object » is recognised Modern linguists like (Chomsky and

by: Halliday) suggest that obeject refers to
such an item that can become subject
➢taracing its position to word order in passive transformation
(after the verb and ater the
c) John broke the glass
preposition)
d) The glass was broken by John
a) Mother gave a doll to my sister
Therefore, « the glass » is object.
➢By inflection (of pronouns)
e) The match lasted three hours
b) John kicked me f) *three hours were lasted by the
match
Therefore, « three hours » is not
object
A. Mimouni
The relation between Functions and classes/ Categories:
Classes and funtions determine each other, but not in any one-to-one relation

A class item can perform several A function can be filled by several

functions classes

• e.g. A noun or a nominal phrase • e.g. the subject of a sentence can

can perform different functions be realized by different classes
The boys play football (Subj & Ob) The dog is barking (Nominal)
The summer palace (Modifier) We will stay here (Pronoun)
He came here last month (Adv) Only two-thirds of the population
He changed trains at Casaport here are workers (Numeral)
(Comp) To run fast can be dangerous (Verbal)
A. Mimouni
 Representing the syntactic Functions: Immediate Constituents
Analysis
Constituent is a term used
The boy ate an apple in structural analysis for
Sentence A ((The boy B)(ate the apple C)) every linguistic unit, which
is a part of alrger lingusitic
Mother node A
unit.

Daughter C
B Daughter
node
The boy ate an apple node Constituents can be
joined together with other
constituents to form a
hierarchically higher
Sisters constituents
A. Mimouni
 Representing the syntactic Functions: Immediate Constituents
Analysis
S When a tree diagram is used to
represent the constituent structure
of a grammatical unit (a phrase or
sentence), syntactic categories are
NP VP used to label the nodes.
NP
Phrasal Level Word Level
Det N V Det N
NP: Noun Phrase N: Noun

AP: Adjective Phrase A: Adjective

The boy ate an apple VP: Verb Phrase V: Verb

PP: Prepositional Phrase P: Preposition

A. Mimouni
Syntactic Category
• It some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow
sense sense. e.g. noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase,
verb phrase,etc.
• More specifically, it refers to the defining properties of these
general units: categories of nouns (number, gender, case) and of
the verb (tense, aspect, voice, etc)

A. Mimouni
 Noun-related Categories
Number:
Is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such
contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc.
In English,
Number is observed in nouns and there are onlt two forms (Sing & plr)
Dog----Dogs
Number is also reflected in the inflection of verbs such as
he laughs/ They laugh
In other languages, for example French, number can also be found in adjectives and
articles
Le cheval royal
Les chevaux royaux

A. Mimouni
 Noun-related Categories
Gender:
Display contrasts as « Masculine » « feminine » « Neuter » « animate » inanimate »,etc
Natural Gender Vs. Grammatical Gender
In English,
Gender is observed in pronouns and small number of nouns (mainly of the natural gender type)
He, she, it
Prince- Princess
In other languages, for example French, gender is manifested in adjectives and articles
Beau cadeau
Belle maison
Le cadeau est beau
La maison est belle
Gender can change the lexical meaning in French

A. Mimouni
 Noun-related Categories

Person:
Reveals whether the person or thing is speaking, spoken to, or spoken of

1st person: speaking (I went to Europe last summer)

2nd person: spoken to (Have you finished?)
3rd person: spoken of ( She has finished)

A. Mimouni
 Noun-related Categories
Agreement: or concord (abbreviated agr) happens when a
word changes form depending on the other words to which it
relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making
the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or
person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence
The syntactic relation may be anaforic (pronoun agrees with its
antecedent: John always criticizes himself)
It can be head and its dependent
1. The bird flies
2. The birds fly

A. Mimouni
 Verb-related Categories
Tense:
A tense is a form of a verb that indicates when in time the action
occurs (past, present, future).
• The time frame is established referring to the present: the past
(passe compose) is past and future is future in relation to the
present
• Some tenses establish their frame by referring to other oction in
the past or the future (Plus-que-parfait, future anterieur)
• Tenes can be descrivbed as simple or compound based on
their number of parts.

A. Mimouni
Verb-related Categories
Apect
The base distinction here is between perfective and imperfective aspects.
The perfective aspect is used when an event is seen as unitary, whole, without internal
composition (typically used for finished and completed events). The opposite of this is the
imperfective aspect, which is used to express an event with internal composition, or when the
duration is the focus and not the beginning or the start of the event/action (typically used for
ongoing or habitual events).

English:
I was reading this book.
- I read this book. (past)
French:
Imparfait: Tex regardait les gents
Passé composé: Texi a sorti une cigarette

A. Mimouni
Verb-related Categories
Apect
The base distinction here is between perfective and imperfective aspects.
The perfective aspect is used when an event is seen as unitary, whole,
without internal composition (typically used for finished and completed
events). The opposite of this is the imperfective aspect, which is used to
express an event with internal composition, or when the duration is the
focus and not the beginning or the start of the event/action (typically used
for ongoing or habitual events).

- I was reading this book.

- I read this book. (past)

A. Mimouni
Verb-related Categories
Mood
Is a grammatical category distinguishing verb tenses.
There are 4 moods in French
✓Indicative(used to relate facts and objective statements):
Tammy se réville tôt le matin
✓Subjunctive( used to express opinions and feelings):
Il est dommage ques leas parents de Tex soient mots.
✓Conditional mood (used to express hypothetical or contrary-to-fact statements:
Si Corey était beau, it aurait une copine
✓The imperative ( used to give direct orders or commands):
Tex, réveille-toi!

A. Mimouni
Verb-related Categories
Voice
Is a grammatical category describing the relationship between a verb
and its subject.
Voice is either active or passive.
Active Passive
The situation where the subject of the The situation where the subject
sentence performs the action of the recieves the action of the verb
verb
▪ Tex was expelled from France by
▪ The authorities expelled Tex from the authorities
France ▪ Tex a été expulsé Les autorités de
▪ Les autorités ont expulsé Tex de France
France
A. Mimouni
Phrase: a sequence of two or more words which is not a clause(
because it does not contain a subject and/or predicate)

• Every Syntactic phrase has a head word

• The head word determines the phrase semantic and grammatical
properties

A. Mimouni
 Clause

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

Clause: is a constituent which contains a subject and a predicate,
and which may also contain other types of element
A. Mimouni
 Clause

• We didn’t know [Adam wears • I’ve never known [Adam wear

glasses] glasses]

Finite Clause: Non-finite Clause:

Its verb inflects for tense/ does not have a nominative subject.
agreement and has a nominative does not contain a verb or aux inflected for
subject tense/ agreement

A. Mimouni
 Types of Sentences

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

Simple Sentence: it contains one independent clause

A. Mimouni
 Types of Sentences

Mary knows John smokes

Subject
Complement
Predicate

Main Clause Complement clause

Complex Sentence: it contains more than one clause

A. Mimouni
 Types of Sentences

Independent Clause Independent clause

Compound Sentence:
A. Mimouni
 Lexical categories

Nouns (N): Adam, job, oven

Verbs (V): eat, play, sleep, chat

Adjectives (Adj): big, lazy, colorless

Determiners (Det): the, a, those, every

Prepositions (P): in, of, over, with

Adverbs (Adv.): quickly, often

A word’s lexical category determines what kind of phrasal category

it can form
Categories & Functions

John smokes

Subject Predicate
 Categories & Functions

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

 Categories & Functions

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

Argument Argument
 Categories & Functions

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

Clause: is an expression which contains a subject and a predicate,
and which may also contain other types of element
 Categories & Functions 1. They occupy
different positions
within the clause

John smokes cigars

2. Subject carry
Nominative case,
whereas
Complement carry
Subject Predicate Complement the acussative

3. In English, verbs
agree with subject
in person and
Number
 Categories & Functions

John watches TV after lunch

Subject Predicate Complement Adjunct

• It does not refer to one of
the entities
• It gives additional
information
 Categories & Functions

TV, Adam never watches it after dinner

Subject Adjunct Predicate Complement Adjunct

Topic

comment
 Types of Sentences

John smokes cigars

Subject Predicate Complement

Simple Sentence: it contains one independent clause

 Types of Sentences

Mary knows John smokes

Subject
Complement
Predicate

Main Clause Complement clause

Complex Sentence: it contains more than one clause

 Complex Sentences

• We expect [Adam will win the race] • We expect [Adam to win the race]
Subject Predicate Subject Predicate

[Adam will win the race]

[Adam to win the race]
Subject Aux
Subject Inf
Verbal
Complement particle
Predicate
Verbal
Predicate Complement

1. Tensed 1. untensed
(Non-past)
 Complex Sentences

• We didn’t know [Adam wears glasses] • I’ve never known [Adam wear glasses]

2. Agreement: the verb agrees with

person singular subject
 Complex Sentences

• We didn’t know [Adam wears • I’ve never known [Adam wear

glasses] glasses]
• We didn’t know [he wears glasses] • I’ve never known [him wear glasses]
• We didn’t know [ *him wears • I’ve never known [*he wear glasses]
glasses]

3. Nominative case 3. Accusative case

 Complex Sentences

• We didn’t know [Adam wears • I’ve never known [Adam wear

glasses] glasses]

Finite Clause: Non-finite Clause:

Its verb inflects for tense/ does not have a nominative subject.
agreement and has a nominative does not contain a verb or aux inflected for
subject tense/ agreement
Tense/ Aspect
➢ The tense is marked by the auxiliaries (is/was) not by the
• He is going home verb form going

• He was going home ➢ The –ing inflection serves to mark Progressive Aspect

➢ Aspect: the duration of the activity described by the verb

• -ing form is non-finite
➢ The tense is marked by the auxiliaries (has/had) not by the
• He has gone home verb form going

• He had gone home ➢ The –n inflection serves to mark Perfect Aspect

➢ Aspect: the completion of the activity described by the

• -n form in non-finite verb
Base form of the verb

• I/we/you/They/ People show little intertests in syntax

• Show serves as a finite present tense form

• She didn’t show any emotion.

• The base form is non-finite
Complex sentence
• I couldn’t find anyone who could help me
• Relative clause
 The function of clauses
• He failed the exam declarative
• Did he help you? interrogative
• You keep quiet imperative
• What a fool I was!
exclamative
 The function of clauses
• He asked who had helped me.
• Did you know he had escaped?
• You tell him what a great time we had!