Unit 6
Syntax: The Sentence Patterns of Languages

Overview

The classification of words is based on their similarities in function, or the role they play in different statements. This unit demonstrates how languages work to combine words into grammatical categories, grammatical categories into phrases, phrases into clauses, and clauses into sentences, thereby describing some of the possible sentence structures found in languages and the basic principles of sentence formation in the English language.

In linguistic analysis, the emphasis is on identifying patterns in languages, in their sound systems (phonology), and in their word structures (morphology). Unit 6 focuses on identifying and analyzing the ways in which phrases and sentences are structured. But patterns of phrase and sentence structure vary considerably between languages, and many of the details of syntax are language specific. The principles that apply to English cannot necessarily be generalized to other languages.

Objectives

After completing this unit, you should be able to

1. define the following terms
   • syntax
   • grammatical
   • constituents
   • constructions
   • node
   • generative grammar
   • subject
   • object
   • verb
   • transformational rules
   • deep structure
   • underlying structure
   • surface structure
2. describe the three components of syntax, the components of a constituent structure tree, and syntactic universals.
3. outline the basic units in transformational-generative analysis.
4. describe how Greenberg typologizes languages on the basis of their word order.
5. identify the word order in selected examples of languages other than English.
6. discuss the relationship of typology and the search for universals, and the importance of universals to anthropology.
7. compare English syntax with selected examples of syntax in other languages.
8. draw constituent structure trees.
9. illustrate formal syntactic rules.