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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 ().
Syntax refers to the linguistic structure above the word level (for example, how sentences are formed) – though without taking into account intonation, which is the domain of phonology. Morphology, by contrast, refers to the structure at and below the word level (for example, how compound words are formed), but above the level of individual ...
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.
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.
The Sentence in Written English: A Syntactic Study Based on an Analysis of Scientific Texts. Cambridge University Press. p. 352. ISBN 978-0-521-11395-3. Jespersen, Otto (1982). Growth and Structure of the English Language. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. p. 244. ISBN 0-226-39877-3. Jespersen, Otto (1992). Philosophy of Grammar.
[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]
In an experiment by Cairns et al., preschool children aged 4–6 were presented sentences such as (14) and (15) orally. (To make sure that the meaning of the sentences was clear to the children, sentences were enacted with toys.) While sentence (14) is well-formed in the adult grammar, sentence (15) is not, as indicated by the asterisk (*).
While the structures that ICA identifies for dependency and constituency grammars differ in significant ways, as the two trees just produced illustrate, both views of sentence structure acknowledge constituents. The constituent is defined in a theory-neutral manner: Constituent A given word/node plus all the words/nodes that that word/node ...