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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.
Level of detail in writing, sometimes known as level of abstraction, refers to three concepts: the precision in using the right words to form phrases, clauses and sentences; [1] the generality of statements; and the organisational strategy in which authors arrange ideas according to a common topic in the hierarchy of detail.
The clause structure with an inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above, is also used in certain types of declarative sentences. This occurs mainly when the sentence begins with adverbial or other phrases that are essentially negative or contain words such as only , hardly , etc.:
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.
The parse tree is the entire structure, starting from S and ending in each of the leaf nodes (John, hit, the, ball). The following abbreviations are used in the tree: S for sentence, the top-level structure in this example. NP for noun phrase. The first (leftmost) NP, a single noun John, serves as the subject of the sentence.
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 repeated sentences or clauses provide emphasis to a central theme or idea the author is trying to convey. [1] Parallelism is the mark of a mature language speaker. [2] In language, syntax is the structure of a sentence, thus parallel syntax can also be called parallel sentence structure. This rhetorical tool improves the flow of a sentence ...