SYNTAX

The grammar of

SENTENCES
 Just as we used morphemes to build
words
a) great-grandmother
b) great-great-grandmother
c) great-great-great-grandmother
d) un+happy+ness
e) We
f) will
g) now
h) use
i) words
j) to construct
k) sentences
Syntactic ambiguity leading to humour
 Traditional parts of speech
We will now use words to construct sentences.
PRONOUN + VERB + ADVERB (time) + VERB + NOUN
NOUN
VERB
PREPOSITION
CONJUNCTION
ADJECTIVE
ADVERB
PRONOUN
INTERJECTION
ARTICLE
 Sentences can be:
SIMPLE (just one clause e.g. The girl is
singing) .
COMPLEX (at least two clauses e.g. John is
writing and Mary is singing).
COMPOUND (at least one subordinate clause
e.g. John said that Mary would sing).
 WORD ORDER
English is an S V O language
also S O V language (Japanese, Korean, Tibetan)
V S O (Welsh, Irish, Hebrew, Arabic)
V O S (Tzotzil)
??? O V S and O S V (in the Amazon basin)
However, even in English marked constructions:
Mary I invited, not Sarah (OVS)
govern thou my song (VSO)
strange fits of passion have I known (OSV)
pensive poets painful vigils keep (Pope SOV)
 CONCORD (AGREEMENT)
Compatibility of two elements in terms of their
grammatical markers
NUMBER (singular, plural)
PERSON (1st, 2nd, 3rd)

TENSE (past, present, future)

VOICE (active, passive)

GENDER (male, female, neutral)

--------------------
ASPECT (perfective, imperfective)

CASE (nominative, genitive, dative )

MOOD (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative)

Concord is complementary to word order