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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 ().
In most sentences, English marks grammatical relations only through word order. The subject constituent precedes the verb and the object constituent follows it. The Object–subject–verb (OSV) may on occasion be seen in English, usually in the future tense or used as a contrast with the conjunction "but", such as in the following examples ...
[1] [2] It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", [3] which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax (the study of sentence structures) from semantics (the study of meaning). [4] [note 1]
These can also include nominal sentences like "The more, the merrier." These mostly omit a main verb for the sake of conciseness but may also do so in order to intensify the meaning around the nouns. [5] Sentences that comprise a single word are called word sentences, and the words themselves sentence words. [6]
Such grammaticality judgements reflect the fact that the structure of sentence (1) obeys the rules of English grammar. This can be seen by comparing sentence (1) with sentence (2). Both sentences have the same structure, and both are grammatically well-formed. (1) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
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.
For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common (or very similar [1]) deep structure.