syntax

What is syntax?

Before, i have posted about morphology. Now we will concentrate on the structure and ordering of components within a sentence, we are studying  the syntax of a language. The word “syntax” comes originally from Greek and literally means “a putting together” or “arrangement”.  So syntax is the study how combine to form sentences. But this is together with inflectional morphology, belongs to what is in traditional terminology  the 'grammar of a language'. 

Grammar and inflectional morphology

The term 'grammar' covers the proper use of words and word-forms as well as the grammatical structure of phrases, clauses, and sentences. While different word-forms of lexemes are created by the adding of inflectional morphemes, combinations of words into more complex units are the domain of syntax proper. 

Sentence structure

Sentences are not simply chains of words, but have an internal, mostly hierarchical structure. This grammatical hierarchycan be illustrated by the following list of the categories used for the analysis of sentence structure:

      1.      sentences contain one or several

      2.      clauses contain one or several

      3.      phrases contain one or several

      4.      words from different word classes

      v  Word Classes & Phrases

Word classes and phrases are very closely linked. First of all, a phrase is named after the word class that acts as head of the phrase. A head is a word upon which everything in a phrase is centered. In a phrase such as full of hope, for instance, all parts of the phrase are associated with the adjective full. Therefore, this construction is called an adjective phrase. Likewise, in the phrase might have mattered, everything is associated with the lexical verb mattered, making this a verb phrase.

To describe both word classes and phrases, the discussion in this section will focus on two of the more important phrase types – noun phrases and verb phrases.

1.      Noun phrases

All noun phrases (NPs) are centered on either a head noun or pronoun. One key characteristic of nouns is that most exhibit number: they have a singular or plural form.

2.      The verb phrase

    the basic structure of the auxiliary verb.

3.      Verbal phrase

   Verbal phrases are to be distinguished from verb phrase. These include participle, gerunds and infinitives. A verbal phrase therefore is a verb phrase without tense and modals. 

          v  Clauses & Sencentes

While words and morphemes have meaning, it is only phrases that can have reference. A clause, then, consists of a referring expression and a predication, which is why only clauses carry information about something The referring expression is always a noun phrase (NP), while the predication is a verb phrase (VP). Accordingly, a complete English sentence, such as the following example sentence, will always contain these components. 

Example:

[The duck]= NP [left the pool]= VP

Clause and sentence can be used synonymously when dealing with simple sentences, a simple sentence contains a single independent clause. By contrast, compound sentences contain multiple clauses that are linked by way of coordinating conjunctions or parataxis. Complex sentences consist of a main clause and at least one subordinate clause.

Example:

The duck left the pool.  = simple sentence

The duck left the pool, but the penguin stayed behind. = compound sentence

The duck left the pool although the penguin stayed behind. = complex sentence

MORPHOLOGY

    A.    What is Morphology?
 

Morphology comes from a Greek word meaning ‘shape’ or ‘form’ and is used in linguistics to denote the study of words, both with regard to their internal structure and their combination or formation to form new or larger units.  So, morphology is the study of the minimal meaningful units of language. It studies the structure of words, however from a semantic viewpoint rather than from the viewpoint of sound. Morphology is intimately related to syntax. For everything that is larger than a word is the domain of syntax.

    B.     Morphemes

morpheme is considered the smallest unit of meaning. For example,

live                  (verb)               man                 (noun)

live | ly            (adj)                 man | ly           (adj)

live | li | hood  (noun)              man | hood      (noun)

Although all morphemes are units of meaning, there are various kinds of morphemes.

Morphemes can be free or bound. If a morpheme is free, it can stand on its own; if it is bound, it must be attached to a free morpheme. In the word walking, the morpheme walk is free because it can stand alone as a word. However, -ing is bound because it has to be attached to a lexical verb, in this case walk. In the examples below, the free morphemes are in italics and the bound morphemes in boldface:

·         Force-ful                    

·         Miss-ed

·         Un-like-li-est

·         Dis-like

·         Pre-judge

·         Mis-inform-ation

    C.     allomorphys.

the term "allomorph" refers to a variant of a morpheme. An allomorph is one of two or more complementary morphs which manifest a morpheme in its different phonological or morphological environments. For example :

rabbit(s)

cat(s)

hiss(es)

    D.    Zero Allomorph

It is a special kind of allomorph which has the form of a null morpheme. An example of zero allomorph in English is the phrase two fish-Ø which can also be two fish-es. In addition, the forms of many auxiliary verbs such as do may have null allomorphs, especially in children's language.

    E.     Inflection & Derivational Morphology

Bound of morphemes are of two types: inflectional and derivational. Inflections are one type of grammatical morpheme, a morpheme that indicates some kind of grammatical relationship.

While inflectional morphemes form a small class in English, derivational morphemes are a much larger class. So derivational is an affix used to change form and meaning from a lexical point with a change in part of speech sometime as seen in the paradigms bellow :

Ambition                     (noun)

Ambitious                   (adj)

Ambitiousness             (noun)

phonology

      Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in natural languages or it is essential the description of the system and patterns of speech sounds in a language. Based on theory of what every speaker of a language unconsciously knows about the sound of patterns of the language. so, phonology is concerned with the abstract or mental aspect of the sounds in language rather than with the actual physcal articulation of speech sounds.

     phonology is about the underlying design, the blueprint of each sound , which serves as the constant basis of all the varitions in different physcal articulations of that sound type in different contexts. When we think of the [t] sound for examples,tar, star, writer, and eighth as being the same. they would be represented in the same way. but it is not, [t] sounds are all different. however in different [t] sounds are less important to us than the distinction between of [k], [f], [b] sounds, because there are meaningful consequences related to use of one rather than the others.

     Phonemics is a particular set of sounds produced in a particular language and distinguishable by native speakers of that language from other (sets of) sounds in that language. That's what "distinctive" means -- the English phonemes /n/ and /ŋ/ can be told apart by native speakers of English, because we use these sounds to distinguish different words -- sin ~ sing, ton ~ tongue, run ~ rung, etc. This would be impossible if these phonemes weren't distinctive in English.

      when we learn to use alphabatic writting, we are actually using the concept of the phonome as the single stable sound type which is represented by a single written symbol. It is in the sense that the phoneme /t/ is described as a sound type, of which all the different spoken version of [t] are token. An essential property of a phoneme is that it functions contrastively. We know there are two phonomes /f/ and /v/ in english because there are the only basis of contrast in meaning between the words fat and vat or fine and vine. This contrastive property is the basic operational test for determining the phonemes that exist in a language. If we substitute one sound for another in a word and there is a change of meaning, then the two sounds represent different phonemes. The basic phonemes of English are listed with the consonant, vowel and diphthong diagrams in 

 Phones & Allophones 

      The vowels in the English words "cool", "whose" and "moon" are all similar but slightly different. They are three variants or allophones of the /u/ phoneme. The different variants are dependent on the different contexts in which they occur. Likewise, the consonant phoneme /k/ has different variant pronunciations in different contexts. Compare:

     Phones are phonetic units and appear in square brackets. When we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we add the prefix “allo-” (= one of a closely related set) and refer to them as allophones of that phoneme. Phones are phonetic units and appear in square brackets. When we have a set of phones, all of which are versions of one phoneme, we add the prefix “allo-” (= one of a closely related set) and refer to them as allophones of that phoneme.