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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 ().
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 first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
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 ...
Thus in the example sentence This tree illustrates ICA according to the dependency relation, many of the phrase structure grammar constituents do not qualify as dependency grammar constituents: This ICA does not view the finite verb phrase illustrates ICA according to the dependency relation nor the individual words tree , illustrates ...
Examples such as (a-g) are not controversial insofar as many theories of sentence structure readily view the strings tested in sentences (a-g) as constituents. However, additional data are problematic, since they suggest that certain strings are also constituents even though most theories of syntax do not acknowledge them as such, e.g.
Marge is the agent in the first pair of sentences because she initiates and carries out the action of fixing, and the coffee table is the patient in both because it is acted upon in both sentences. In contrast, the subject and direct object are not consistent across the two sentences.
Note that examples (3)-(8) are open to interpretation as judgement is based entirely on intuition, and determination of grammaticality is dependent on one's theory of what the grammar is. Therefore, different individuals may assign the same sentence different degrees of acceptability.