Linguistics

The eleventh week

Chapter 4 Syntax

4.1 Introduction 4.2 Word Classes

Key point

Word Classes

Difficult point

Word Classes

Introduction

Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies the sentence structure.

The major distinction between morphology and syntax is that the former is concerned with the internal composition of a word, while the latter is concerned with the combination of words.

Word order plays a key role in English and Chinese:

(1) a. The hunter chased the game. b. The game chased the hunter. (2) 我们在第十三周学习句法学。 Clearly, (1a) and (1b) do not have the sam

e meaning. In inflectional languages like Russian, wo

rd order is not as important.

Word Classes

The categories are traditionally called parts of speech, but now they are generally called word classes.

Word class

Nouns Adjectives Verbs. Adverbs Prepositions pronoun Conjunctions

Sentence of “The hunter fears the cries of the blackbirds”

S → Art., N, Art., N, prep., Art., N.

In English the order “Art., adv., adj., N” is acceptable, the order “adj., Art., adv., N” is not. The rules which govern the structure of phrases are known as phrase structure rules or rewrite rules. Such rules allow for the generation of grammatical sentences in a language; they constitute a generative grammar for that language.

Assignment

Review what have been learned in the class.