PKB 3105

COMPONENTS OF LANGUAGE: SYNTAX.

Wan Nurul Aisyah Binti Wan Hamat PISMP PK (BM) / PJ / BI Intake January 2010 Pn Sharina Binti Shahabudin

DEFINITION

Syntax is the discipline that examines the rules of a language that dictate how the various parts of sentences go together.

Morphology looks at how the smallest linguistic unit (called morphemes) are formed into complete words, syntax looks at how those words are formed into complete sentences.

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages.

We can define syntax as the 'study of the structure of phrases clauses and sentences'.

SYNTAX

Syntax concerns the construction of phrases and clauses. For instance, the word order which is very important, the agreement between subjects and verbs.
The little young red cat vs The red little young cat (uncorrect) Examples: Joseph gave a rose to Edith vs Edith a rose Joseph gave (uncorrect).

So we must remember that Word Order in English and other languages such as Italian, French, etc are important as it carries meaning. It is the competence (or linguistic knowledge) that helps us to understand which is the well-formed sentence and which is the ill-formed sentence.

One part of syntax, called inflection, deals with how the end of a word might change to tell a listener or reader something about the role that word is playing. Regular verbs in English, for example, change their ending based on the tense the verb is representing in a sentence,
y

Example: Robert danced (we know the sentence is in the past tense) and when we see Robert is dancing, we know it is not.

Eg : regular nouns in English become plural simply by adding an s to the end. Cues like these play a large role in helping hearers to understand sentences.

part of syntax covers the various parts of speech that a language uses and separates the words of the language into these groups. Each part of speech in turn has various rules that may be applied to it, and other rules that dictate when it cant be used. For example, makes use of nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, pronouns, prepositions, adverbs, and others, while other languages may not have a separate class for adjectives or may make use of classes not found in English.
Another

SUBJECT VERB OBJECT

In English, our basic order is Subject Verb Object; this means that in a simple sentence The first noun phrase is the subject, and the subsequent verb phrase may contain the object. This allows us to deduce that in the sentence The boy kicked the ball, the boy is the subject, and therefore the one doing the kicking, whereas the ball is the object, and therefore being kicked. If the sentence were The ball kicked the boy, the meaning would be reversed somewhat confusingly, and if it were Kicked the ball the boy, we would immediately recognize it as violating our basic syntactical order and therefore as being ungrammatical.

The boy kicked the ball

subject object

The boy is the subject, and therefore the one doing the kicking, whereas the ball is the object, and therefore being kicked.

THANK YOU