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In linguistics, syntax (/ ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN-taks) [1] [2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences.Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), [3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ().
The name "right-branching" comes from the English syntax of putting such modifiers to the right of the sentence. For example, the following sentence is right-branching. The dog slept on the doorstep of the house in which it lived. Note that the sentence begins with the subject, followed by a verb, and then the object of the verb. This is then ...
In syntax, dislocation is a sentence structure in which a constituent, which could otherwise be either an argument or an adjunct of the clause, occurs outside the clause boundaries either to its left or to its right. In this English example They went to the store, Mary and Peter the dislocation occurs to the right.
Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language. [ 2 ] Linguists generally accept nine English word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and exclamations.
What this means is that for phrase structure rules to be applicable at all, one has to pursue a constituency-based understanding of sentence structure. The constituency relation is a one-to-one-or-more correspondence. For every word in a sentence, there is at least one node in the syntactic structure that corresponds to that word.
An incomplete sentence, or sentence fragment, is a set of words that does not form a complete sentence, either because it does not express a complete thought or because it lacks some grammatical element, such as a subject or a verb. [6] [7] A dependent clause without an independent clause is an example of an incomplete sentence.
The nature of branching is most visible with full trees. The following trees have been chosen to illustrate the extent to which a structure can be entirely left- or entirely right-branching. The following sentence is completely left-branching. The constituency-based trees are on the left, and the dependency-based trees are on the right: [7]
The declarative sentence is the most common kind of sentence in language, in most situations, and in a way can be considered the default function of a sentence. What this means essentially is that when a language modifies a sentence in order to form a question or give a command, the base form will always be the declarative.