SYNTAX:

Sentence structure
(constituents)
PBW1033 Structure of English
 Structure of Language
• Structure?
• structure - a very general concept that applies to any complex thing, whether
it’s a bicycle, a commercial company, or a carbon molecule
• English syntax - the structure of English sentences
• structure - central to the study of syntax
• complex - not that it is complicated (may be), but that:
(a) it’s divisible into parts (its constituents),
(b) there are different kinds of parts (different categories of constituents),
(c) the constituents are arranged in a certain way,
(d) each constituent has a specifiable function in the structure of the thing
as a whole
• linguistic expressions (sentences and phrases) – complex structures
• E.g. word-sequences
• not all the word sequences would be acceptable expressions of English
• When a sequence of words fails to constitute a good expression in English,
>>> ungrammatical (or ill-formed)
• For example:
[1a] the nevertheless procrastinate in foxtrot
[1b] disappears none girls of the students
[1c] Max will bought a frying pans.
• a full syntactic description of any language
• Important - distinguish between strings of words that are well-formed
expressions and those that are not
• How? - use diagrams to show how things are analysed into their constituent
parts
• Tree diagram
• In dealing with syntactic structure, we will be doing 3 things:

• (a) analysing linguistic expressions into their constituents,

• (b) identifying the categories of those constituents, and
• (c) determining their functions

• Question: What do sentences consist of?

• answer: draw a tree diagram, starting with ‘Sentence’ at the top
• E.g. “Old Sam sunbathed beside a stream.”

• phrases

• Wrong >>> as a description of the structure of the sentence

• Why? only tells what words appear in the sentence & in what order they
appear
• Fact >>> words are not immediate constituents of the sentence, but belong
with other words to form groups – phrases
• Phrases >>> have their own position in the structure of the sentence
• “ Sentences certainly contain words, they don’t consist of words.
They consist of phrases.”
• Question: What kinds (or categories) of words can be combined to form
structural groups/ constituents?
• Check:
(i) Stream old Sam sunbathed beside a. X
(ii) Sunbathed old beside stream a Sam. X
(ii) Old Sam sunbathed beside a stream. √
• Old Sam sunbathed beside a stream. [sentence]
• Old sam [ ]
• sunbathed beside a stream [ ]
• beside a stream [ ]
• a stream [ ]

• include information about grammatical categories in the diagrams

 The Major Parts of Speech: nouns, verbs,
adjectives, adverbs

• The major parts of speech contribute the major “content” to a message,

• called content words
• opposed to other parts of speech (function or structure words)
• the ones that appear in newspaper headlines (space is at a premium)
• Definition?
• “A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea” or “A verb is an action word.”
• That’s lovely, but they’re slippery definitions – we
• Test: appetite - a noun? but not a person, place, thing, or idea;
• Test: seem – a verb? But not an action word

• So instead of these meaning based definitions of parts of speech, we use

structural definitions – that is, definitions based on the structure of a word,
and/or its position in a sentence structure
 The Minor Parts of Speech

• Pronouns, Articles, Auxiliary verbs, Negation, Prepositions, Intensifiers,

Conjunctions
• minor classes of words
• often referred to as closed classes
• Minor word classes - tend not to alter the basic content of a sentence
(function or grammatical words)
• Wh-words
• such as who and what,
• occur in a wide range of constructions.
• In traditional grammars, they are called interrogative or relative pronouns.
• Conjunctions
• Intensifiers
• E.g. more, most, very, quite, rather, somewhat
• Traditional grammars often call such words degree adverbs
• intensifiers do not have the moveability of true adverbs, nor can they occur
in the comparative or superlative constructions
 a. morer a. more extremely
b. mostest b. quite extremely
c. more quite c. very thoroughly
d. most rather d. rather thoroughly
e. very quite e. extremely thoroughly
f. rather very
real degree adverbs (e.g.,
extremely and thoroughly) do
allow these possibilities