Christian University of Indonesia

Faculty of Letters and Language

Name : Rivaldi Yudistira Bratanegara

NIM : 2221157001
Date : 24 February 2023

SYNTAX SUMMARY

The lexical categories are categories that are high in meaning (Jackson, 1989). The words can
be grouped together into one of the four groups according to shared similarities in semantic
content (meaning), inflectional affixation (grammatical prefixes and/or suffixes), and distribution
(placement in a sentence). Words with these shared characteristics belong to the same syntactic
category. There are four lexical categories: Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb. In a simple way,
each elaboration of lexical categories are presented below;

a. N: referring to an individual or entity

b. V: referring to an action
c. A: referring to a property
d. Adv: referring to the manner, location, time or frequency of an action

To determine the lexical categories, the first way is by using the morphological form. For nouns
(_+) can be identified by plural morpheme (e)s, or possessive ‘s. For Verb, it can be seen when it
is added by past tense ed or s suffix. For adjective, it can be in the form of comperative and
superlative suffixes such as er/est or –ly.

As the goal of syntax is to build a well structured grammatical sentences forms, the grammar of
lexical categories is described as S= Det+ (A)+ N+V+Det+(A)+N. (The brackets are optional).
Moreover, to make the grammatical sentences align with grammatical sense, the grammatical
rules offer what is called as constituents. Constituents is the grouping of words into larger
phrasal units to understand the agreements between lexical categories (Jackson, 1989).

For example, a. The mother of the boy and the girl is arriving soon. b. The mother of the boy
and the girl are arriving soon. The constituents allow us to see who is arriving: a. The mother of
[the boy and the girl]] is arriving soon. b. [The mother of the boy] and [the girl] are arriving
soon.

Phrasal Structure rules

Once the constituent bracketing has been identified, all nodes should be classified, i.e. assigned
syntactic category labels. Such as
a. NOUN PHRASE
Noun phrase (NP) is the most important syntactic categories. A Noun phrase can be used
as the subject of a sentence as in (a); as direct object as in (b); as indirect object as in (c);
and many other ways as well. a. Most students enjoy noodles. b. He likes most students c.
The Rector gave most students their books this morning. A noun phrase may consist of
determiner which has functions as the modifiers and a noun which is the head groups,
e.g., a man, the students, his book, their father, one book, many students, that book. A
noun phrase may also consist of determiner, an adjective, or a noun as modifier, and a
noun as a head, e.g., a clever student, the young man, the good character, the table’s leg,
many diligent workers, the good island, the pretty woman, some intelligent person.
S= NP (DET (MY) + N (CAT)) + VP (V (IS)+ ADJP (ADV (VERY)+ADJ(SICK)))
My cat is very sick
b. Verb phrase
The headword in a VP is always a verb. Verbs are divided into MAIN VERBS (V),
which carry most of the lexical meaning, eg. talk, run, love etc, and AUXILIARY
VERBS (a), which modify the main verb. The main verb is always the headword. The
PRIMARY AUXILIARIES (be, have, do) can be either main verbs or auxiliaries
depending on whether they stand alone or modify other verbs.
My cat is very sick
c. Adjective phrase
The headword of an AjP is an Adjective. For reasons that will be explained, we do not
need to label AjP's separately in a NP where they all modify the headword directly. Thus
we simply labelled the headwords as modifiers within the NP. If the AjP comes after the
Noun it modifies.
d. Adverb
 A phrase with an Adverb as headword is an Adverb Phrase (AvP). Adverbs give us extra
information about such things as the time, place or manner of the action described by the
Verb. Semantically AvP's have much in common with PP's, since they too often give us
information about time and place.
e. preposition

PP's are easy to identify because they always begin with a preposition. Many of them give us
extra information about the place or time of an action.

In short:

a. S → NP VP
b. NP → (Det) A* N (PP/S)
c. VP → V (NP) (PP/S/VP)
d. AP → A (PP/S)
e. AdvP → (AdvP) Adv (VERY SLOWLY)
f. PP → P NP ( p (at) np (det (the) n (park))

References:

Jackson, H. (1989). Words and Their Meanings. Longman, London and New York

Sells, P., & Kim, J. (2007). English Syntax: An Introduction. United States: CSLI Publications.