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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 speaker could be rejecting the sentence for reasons other than its grammaticality, including the context or meaning of the sentence, a particular word choice, or other factors. For example, consider this ungrammatical sentence: [35] (16) The elephant are jumping.
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 ...
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.
[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]
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.
Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed result in a view of sentence structure that is constituency-based. Thus, grammars that employ phrase structure rules are constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars), as opposed to dependency grammars, [4] which view sentence structure as dependency-based. What this means is that for ...
The term "word" has no well-defined meaning. [7] Instead, two related terms are used in morphology: lexeme and word-form [definition needed]. Generally, a lexeme is a set of inflected word-forms that is often represented with the citation form in small capitals. [8] For instance, the lexeme eat contains the word-forms eat, eats, eaten, and ate.