•By:

•Amal Odeh Methodology of Written Expression in

•Marco Mowatt English
 What is the syntax?

Basic ideas of syntax

Syntax properties
Outline
Syntactic Constituency

Syntactic Categories

Constructing a Grammar
Syntactic Properties
Syntactic properties determine how we combine lexical expressions to
form sentences.
There are two kinds of syntactic properties:

• Word order
• Co-occurrence
Co-occurrence
There are numerous tests for constituents that are commonly used to identify the constituents of English
sentences.

Consider the following sentence:

(1)   John angered Mary.
       It consists of three words, two nouns and separated by a verb.
(2)   The big dog angered the cat.
       It contains six words. Three words, the big dog, seem to play
the same role in (2) that one word, John plays in (1).
(3)   [The big dog] angered [the cat]
 

It has three chunks, even though it has a different number of words. These
linguistic chunks are enclosed bracket and are called CONSTITUENTS.
We can also scramble things a bit and produce other sentences that are parallel.
 
 (4) The cat angered John.
       Mary angered the big dog.
 
John, Mary, the big dog, and the cat are the same type of constituents, since they are substituting for each other. This type of
constituent is called a NOUN PHRASE (NP)
 

Sentence diagrams are employed (D = determiner, N = noun, NP = noun phrase, A= Articles, S = sentence,
V = Verb, VP = verb phrase):
For example:
Grammatical knowledge is represented as constructions:
Pairing of form (Manner) and meaning (process).
A simple sentence contains only an independent sentence.

Compound Sentence are of two clauses.

The complex sentences have one or more than one dependent clauses.
 • References
• Linguistics, A. [AzeLinguistics]. (2020, July 8). Syntactic Categories. Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oturENENbiM
• Masbejosite, P. by. (2016, June 28). Constituent Structure, syntactic categories, and
grammatical relations. Blog for Education.
https://masbejosite.wordpress.com/2016/06/28/constituent-structure-syntactic-
categories-and-grammatical-relations/
• Seidlitz Education. (2020, November 19). Building better sentences: Rigorous syntax
for English learners. Seidlitz Education. https://seidlitzblog.org/2020/11/18/building-
better-sentences-rigorous-syntax-for-english-learners/
• Syntactic properties. (n.d.). Prezi.com. Retrieved October 6, 2022, from
https://prezi.com/5rk8g927d5xj/syntactic-properties
• Wikipedia contributors. (2022, May 16). Constituent (linguistics). Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=Constituent_(linguistics)&oldid=1088189204
• (N.d.). Toppr.com. Retrieved October 6, 2022, from
https://www.toppr.com/guides/english-language/correct-sentences/sentence-
formation/