STUDY OF SYNTAX IN LINGUISTICS

Languages have rules. The rules of a language are called the grammar. The reason for these rules
is that a person needs to be able to speak an indeterminately large number of sentences in a lifetime.
The effort would be impossibly great if each sentence had to be learnt separately.

By learning the rules for connecting words it is possible to create an infinite number of sentences,
all of which are meaningful to a person who knows the syntax. Thus it is possible to construct
many sentences that the speaker has never heard before.

A finite number of rules facilitates an infinite number of sentences that can be simultaneously
understood by both the speaker and the listener.

In order for this to work with any degree of success, the rules have to be precise and have to be
consistently adhered to. These rules cover such things as: the way words are constructed; the way
the endings of words are changed according to context (inflection); the classification of words
into parts of speech (nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc.); the way parts of speech are connected together.

The rules of grammar do not have to be explicitly understood by the speaker of the language or
the listener.

The majority of native speakers of a language will have no formal knowledge of the grammar of a
language but are still capable of speaking the language grammatically to a great degree of accuracy.
Native speakers of a language assimilate these rules subconsciously while the language is being
learned as a child.

The Components of Grammars

The grammar of a language has several components. These can be described as follows:

a) The phonetics that governs the structure of sounds;

b) The morphology that governs the structure of words;

c) The syntax, which governs the structure of sentences

d) The semantics that governs the meanings of words and sentences.

We are concerned here primarily with the syntax of the structure of sentences.

Syntax

In linguistics, "syntax" refers to the rules that govern the ways in which words combine to
form phrases, clauses, and sentences. The term "syntax" comes from the Greek, meaning "arrange
together." The term is also used to mean the study of the syntactic properties of a language.

 Syntax is the proper order of words in a phrase or sentence.

 Syntax is a tool used in writing proper grammatical sentences.
 Native speakers of a language learn correct syntax without realizing it.
 The complexity of a writer's or speaker's sentences creates a formal or informal level of
diction that is presented to its audience.

The Representations of Syntax

In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for instance, for
the following sentence:

"The boy kicked the ball"

The syntax can be described, by the following methods:

1. A statement of the correct sequence of the parts of speech (or Syntactic Categories):

Subject is followed by verb is followed by object.

In the above example,

Subject = "The boy" (article followed by noun)

Verb = "kicked"

Object = "The ball" (article followed by noun)

2. by a series of transformational rules

For example:

Where in the above example,

3. By parsing diagrams

Here, the parts of a sentence are shown in a graphical way that emphasizes the hierarchical
relationships between the components of a sentence. For example:
Where:

Subject = “the boy” (article + noun)

Verb = “kicked”

Object = “the ball” (article + noun)

The above structure is the basic syntactic structure for a sentence in the English language. As more
complex sentences are considered, it is easy, by this method, to see how these different structures
relate to each other, by further breaking down the branches of the structure. The syntax of the
language contains the rules which govern the structure of phrases and how these can be joined
together. The structures and associated rules vary from one language to another.

Parsing diagrams are capable of representing not just one particular language’s grammar but are
capable of representing any kind of grammar. For instance, they can be used to represent the rules
of invented languages such as computer programming languages.

This method of representation is the one that I will use to represent musical structures because of
the graphic nature of the representation and the flexibility of the approach. By this method, we can
show the types of syntactic structures in music and show how they relate to each other by
expending or contracting branches of the structure.

Examples of More Complex Syntactic Structures in language

1. Embedding

It is possible to construct sentences which are more complex than the example above. This is done
by embedding further phrases within the basic structure. For example, in the sentence:
"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball."

"With red shorts" is a prepositional phrase that further describes “the boy”.

This can be represented, within the basic sentence structure, as follows:

Here we can see how the Prepositional Phrase (PP) “with red shorts” is embedded within the
subject Noun Phrase (NP) so that the subject is subdivided into a Noun Phrase and Prepositional
Phrase (PP). The Prepositional Phrase itself contains a further Noun Phrase. The parsing diagram
clearly shows the hierarchical relationship between the sentence and its components. There are
many other ways of extending this structure by embedding subordinate phrases at different parts
of the basic structure.

2. Conjoining.

It is also possible to extend sentences by joining together complete structures or complete and
incomplete structures, for example:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball and scored a goal"
The conjunction “and” joins together the complete sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball"

And the verb phrase:

“Scored a goal"

This could be represented as follows: