Syntax of

Mother Tongue
PRESENTED BY: GROUP 4
Topic Overview
I. The Syntactic Features of Mother
Tongue
- What is Syntax?

- Constituency
- Linear Word Order
- Hierarchical Structure

II. The Transformational-

Generative Grammar Model

- Surface and Deep Structure

-Aspects Model or Standard Theory
and Four Main Components
Syntax
Syntax, in a broader perspective of linguistic, is the
study of how words are ordered in human language;
what rules are necessary to describe a particular
language; and how can these rules differ across
languages.

Syntax is concerned with the set of rules and

principles in a language, which relate to how words
and phrases are arranged to create well-formed
sentences(OED 2015).
 Syntactic Features of
Mother Tongue

Constituency Linear Word Hierarchical

Order Structure
 Constituency
• The basic unit of sentence structure.
Constituent- is a group of words that functions as a unit.

Example:

The arrangement of constituents

The girl ate the mango.
in a sentence show their
relationship to one another.
Replacement test
• If you can replace part of the sentence with another constituent
(the smallest constituent being a single word), this tells us that the
replaced section of the sentence is a constituent.

__________
1. The students left.
_____ left.
- They
• The student is a constituent

2. The students ate the sandwiches.

-They
_____ ate the sandwiches.
_____________
-The students ate them.
_____
-The students dined.
______
• [The students [ate [the sandwiches]].
 Sentence fragment test

• Generally, only constituents can be used in the fragmentary

response to a question.

1. Who ate the sandwiches?

• The students.
2. What did the students do?
• Ate the sandwiches
3. What did the students eat?
• The sandwiches.
• [The students][ate[the
sandwiches]].
 Movement test-clefting

• If you can move a sequence of words together to another part of a sentence that means
roughly the same thing , that sequence of words is a constituent.
• Clefting involves creating a sentence of the shape (It was- who/ that) out of your
sentence.

• The students ate the sandwiches.

- It was [the students] who ate the sandwiches.
- It was [the sandwiches] that the students ate.
-It was [eat the sandwiches] that the students
did.
• [The students][ate[the sandwiches]].
 Tree Diagram
- Allows us to analyze the function of the sentence.

The girl ate the mango. Sentence

verb phrase

noun phrase noun phrase

Determiner
noun verb Determiner noun

The girl ate the mango

 Linear Word Order
- The words in a sentence must occur in a particular sequence if
the sentence is to convey the desired meaning.
Example:
1. Gisulyapan ni Dodong si Nene.
If we rearrange the words in this sentence, we either come up
with nonsense, as in example below
2. Si Nene ni Dodong gisulyapan.
In linear word order, we put simply that ordering of the words in sentences
determines in the part whether a sentence is grammatical or not, and what
the sentence means.
 Hierarchical Structure
- The individual words in a sentence are organized into natural,
semantically coherent groupings, the largest grouping of all
being the sentence itself.

- These groupings within a sentence are called constituents of

that sentence. The relationship between constituents in a
sentence form the constituents structure of the sentence .

Example:
1. Daghang pamilya ang nangaon sa mga nindot
nga restawran.
 The Transformational- Generative Grammar by
Zellig S. Harris
• Is the part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural
native languages.
• It is known as Transformational Grammar, which is a system of
language analysis.
• It shows the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and
among the possible sentences.
• The process of rules which are transformations of sentences to express
semantics with help of surface structures and deep structures.
 Surface and Deep Structures
SURFACE STRUCTURE
- refers to the words/language we use to represent the deep
structure
- It refers to the sentence as it is pronounced or written
- Phonetic representation of sentences

DEEP STRUCTURE
- refers to concepts, thoughts, ideas and feelings
- expresses the semantic contents of a sentence
- contain the basic units of meaning of a sentence
Aspects Model or Standard Theory by Noam
Chomsky( as presented in his book Syntactic
Structures)
-According to him, the grammar of a language is a
statement of what a person has to know in order to
recognize and utterance as grammatical, but not a
hypothesis of the process involved in either producing or
undertanding a language.
 Aspects Model or Standard Theory
and Four main Components
A. The Base Components
• Produces or generates basic syntactic structures called
Deep Structures.

B. Transformational Component
• Transforms of changes the basic structures into
sentences called surface Structures
C. Phonological Component
• Gives sentences a phonetic representation so that
they may be pronounced properly or perfectly.

D. Semantic Components
• Deals with the meaning of sentences.
Thank's for
Listening!