In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Lingu ...
, syntax () is the study of how words and
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...
s combine to form larger units such as
phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can con ...
s and
sentences. Central concerns of syntax include
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
,
grammatical relations
In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional gra ...
, hierarchical sentence structure (
constituency),
agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting of ...
, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...
). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Etymology
The word ''syntax'' comes from
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...
roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering".
Topics
The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations).
Sequencing of subject, verb, and object
One basic description of a language's syntax is the sequence in which the
subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
(S),
verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
(V), and
object (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place the subject first, either in the sequence
SVO or the sequence
SOV. The other possible sequences are
VSO,
VOS,
OVS, and
OSV OSV may be:
* OSV-96, a Russian anti-materiel rifle
* Object–subject–verb word order
* Offshore vessel
* Old Sturbridge Village
* Open-source voting
* ''Our Sunday Visitor
Our Sunday Visitor (OSV) is a Catholic publishing company in Hunti ...
, the last three of which are rare. In most generative theories of syntax, the surface differences arise from a more complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations. However, word order can also reflect the semantics or function of the ordered elements.
Grammatical relations
Another description of a language considers the set of possible grammatical relations in a language or in general and how they behave in relation to one another in the
morphosyntactic alignment
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments (in English, subject and object) of transitive verbs like ''the dog chased the cat'', and the single argument of ...
of the language. The description of grammatical relations can also reflect transitivity,
passivization, and head-dependent-marking or other agreement. Languages have different criteria for grammatical relations. For example, subjecthood criteria may have implications for how the subject is referred to from a relative clause or coreferential with an element in an infinite clause.
Constituency
Constituency is the feature of being a
constituent
Constituent or constituency may refer to:
Politics
* An individual voter within an electoral district, state, community, or organization
* Advocacy group or constituency
* Constituent assembly
* Constituencies of Namibia
Other meanings
* Cons ...
and how words can work together to form a constituent (or ''phrase''). Constituents are often moved as units, and the constituent can be the domain of agreement. Some languages allow discontinuous phrases in which words belonging to the same constituent are not immediately adjacent but are broken up by other constituents. Constituents may be
recursive
Recursion (adjective: ''recursive'') occurs when a thing is defined in terms of itself or of its type. Recursion is used in a variety of disciplines ranging from linguistics to logic. The most common application of recursion is in mathemati ...
, as they may consist of other constituents, potentially of the same type.
Early history
The ''
Aṣṭādhyāyī
The (Devanagari अष्टाध्यायी) is a grammar that describes a form of an early Indo-Aryan language: Sanskrit.
Authored by Sanskrit philologist and scholar Pāṇini and dated to around 500 BCE, it describes the language as cu ...
'' of
Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' ( Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas= Descriptive linguistics
(Devanag ...
, from c. 4th century BC in
Ancient India
According to consensus in modern genetics, anatomically modern humans first arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa between 73,000 and 55,000 years ago. Quote: "Y-Chromosome and Mt-DNA data support the colonization of South Asia by ...
, is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory since works on
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
had been written long before modern syntax came about. In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of
Dionysius Thrax
Dionysius Thrax ( grc-gre, Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ ''Dionýsios ho Thrâix'', 170–90 BC) was a Greek grammarian and a pupil of Aristarchus of Samothrace. He was long considered to be the author of the earliest grammatical text on the Gre ...
.
For centuries, a framework known as , first expounded in 1660 by
Antoine Arnauld
Antoine Arnauld (6 February 16128 August 1694) was a French Catholic theologian, philosopher and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics. Cont ...
in a book of the same title, dominated work in syntax: as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and so there is a single most natural way to express a thought.
However, in the 19th century, with the development of
historical-comparative linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
# to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
# ...
, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought and so
logic
Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.
The
Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. (Indeed, large parts of
Port-Royal Logic
''Port-Royal Logic'', or ''Logique de Port-Royal'', is the common name of ''La logique, ou l'art de penser'', an important textbook on logic first published anonymously in 1662 by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, two prominent members of the J ...
were copied or adapted from the ''Grammaire générale''.) Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "subject – copula – predicate". Initially, that view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as
Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp (; 14 September 1791 – 23 October 1867) was a German linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precis ...
.
The central role of syntax within
theoretical linguistics
Theoretical linguistics is a term in linguistics which, like the related term general linguistics, can be understood in different ways. Both can be taken as a reference to theory of language, or the branch of linguistics which inquires into the ...
became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. (For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Giorgio Graffi (2001).)
Theories
There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of
Derek Bickerton, sees syntax as a branch of biology, since it conceives of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human
mind
The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for vario ...
. Other linguists (e.g.,
Gerald Gazdar
Gerald James Michael Gazdar, FBA (born 24 February 1950) is a British linguist and computer scientist.
Education
He was educated at Heath Mount School, Bradfield College, the University of East Anglia (BA, 1970) and the University of Reading (M ...
) take a more
Platonistic view since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract
formal system
A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system.
A for ...
. Yet others (e.g.,
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.
Life Early life and education
Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...
) consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages.
Syntacticians have attempted to explain the causes of word-order variation within individual languages and cross-linguistically. Much of such work has been done within the framework of generative grammar, which holds that syntax depends on a
genetic endowment common to the human species. In that framework and in others,
linguistic typology
Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...
and
universals
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For exa ...
have been primary explicanda.
Alternative explanations, such as those by
functional linguists, have been sought in
language processing. It is suggested that the brain finds it easier to
parse
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...
syntactic patterns that are either right- or left-
branching but not mixed. The most-widely held approach is the performance–grammar correspondence hypothesis by
John A. Hawkins, who suggests that language is a non-innate
adaptation to innate
cognitive
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought ...
mechanisms. Cross-linguistic tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Some languages, however, exhibit regular inefficient patterning such as the VO languages
Chinese, with the
adpositional phrase
An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or ci ...
before the verb, and
Finnish, which has postpositions, but there are few other profoundly exceptional languages.
More recently, it is suggested that the left- versus right-branching patterns are cross-linguistically related only to the place of role-marking connectives (
adpositions and
subordinators), which links the phenomena with the semantic mapping of sentences.
Theoretical syntactic models
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesniè ...
is an approach to sentence structure in which syntactic units are arranged according to the dependency relation, as opposed to the constituency relation of
phrase structure grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue ( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in ...
s. Dependencies are directed links between words. The (finite) verb is seen as the root of all clause structure and all the other words in the clause are either directly or indirectly dependent on the root. Some prominent dependency-based theories of syntax are the following:
*
Recursive categorical syntax
Michael K. Brame (January 27, 1944 — August 16, 2010) was an American linguist and professor at the University of Washington, and founding editor of the peer-reviewed research journal, ''Linguistic Analysis''. He was known for his theory of rec ...
, or algebraic syntax
*
Functional generative description Functional generative description (FGD) is a linguistic framework developed at Charles University in Prague since the 1960s by a team led by Petr Sgall. Based on the dependency grammar formalism, it is a stratificational grammar formalism that treat ...
*
Meaning–text theory
Meaning–text theory (MTT) is a theoretical linguistic framework, first put forward in Moscow by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of models of natural language. The theory provides a large and elaborate basis for ...
*
Operator grammar
*
Word grammar
Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954) is widely seen as the father of modern dependency-based theories of syntax and grammar. He argued vehemently against the binary division of the clause into
subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
and
predicate that is associated with the grammars of his day (S → NP VP) and remains at the core of most phrase structure grammars. In the place of that division, he positioned the verb as the root of all clause structure.
Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar
Categorial grammar is a family of formalisms in natural language syntax that share the central assumption that syntactic constituents combine as functions and arguments. Categorial grammar posits a close relationship between the syntax and sema ...
is an approach in which constituents combine as
function and
argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialect ...
, according to combinatory possibilities specified in their
syntactic categories A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the ''phrasal ...
. For example, other approaches might posit a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), but CG would posit a syntactic category ''NP'' and another ''NP\S'', read as "a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for an NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)." Thus, the syntactic category for an
intransitive
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb whose context does not entail a direct object. That lack of transitivity distinguishes intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, which entail one or more objects. Additionally, intransitive verbs are ...
verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a
function word
In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker ...
requiring an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. The complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. The category of
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transiti ...
is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. That is notated as (NP/(NP\S)), which means, "A category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object) and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence."
Tree-adjoining grammar
Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG) is a grammar formalism defined by Aravind Joshi. Tree-adjoining grammars are somewhat similar to context-free grammars, but the elementary unit of rewriting is the tree rather than the symbol. Whereas context-free gr ...
is a categorial grammar that adds in partial
tree structure
A tree structure, tree diagram, or tree model is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a structure in a graphical form. It is named a "tree structure" because the classic representation resembles a tree, although the chart is genera ...
s to the categories.
Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories
Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon
probability theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set o ...
are known as
stochastic grammars. One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a
neural network
A neural network is a network or neural circuit, circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up ...
or
connectionism
Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mind, mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial ...
.
Functional grammars
Functionalist models of grammar study the form–function interaction by performing a structural and a functional analysis.
*
Functional discourse grammar (Dik)
*
Prague linguistic circle
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis an ...
*
Role and reference grammar
Role and reference grammar (RRG) is a model of grammar developed by William A. Foley and Robert Van Valin, Jr. in the 1980s, which incorporates many of the points of view of current functional grammar theories.
In RRG, the description of a sente ...
(RRG)
*
Systemic functional grammar
Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a form of grammatical description originated by Michael Halliday. It is part of a social semiotic approach to language called ''systemic functional linguistics''. In these two terms, ''systemic'' refers to ...
Generative syntax
Generative syntax is the study of syntax within the overarching framework of
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
. Generative theories of syntax typically propose analyses of grammatical patterns using formal tools such as
phrase structure grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue ( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in ...
s augmented with additional operations such as
syntactic movement
Syntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of ''discontinuous constituents'' or ''displacement''. Some constituen ...
. Their goal in analyzing a particular language is to specify rules which generate all and only the expressions which are
well-formed in that language. In doing so, they seek to identify innate domain-specific principles of linguistic cognition, in line with the wider goals of the generative enterprise. Generative syntax is among the approaches that adopt the principle of the
autonomy of syntax by assuming that meaning and communicative intent is determined by the syntax, rather than the other way around.
Generative syntax was proposed in the late 1950s by
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, building on earlier work by
Zellig Harris
Zellig Sabbettai Harris (; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and di ...
,
Louis Hjelmslev
Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (; 3 October 189930 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studie ...
, and others. Since then, numerous theories have been proposed under its umbrella:
*
Transformational grammar
In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combin ...
(TG) (Original theory of generative syntax laid out by Chomsky in ''Syntactic Structures'' in 1957)
*
Government and binding theory
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is ...
(GB) (revised theory in the tradition of TG developed mainly by Chomsky in the 1970s and 1980s)
*
Minimalist program
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
Following Imre Lakatos's distinction, Chomsky presents minim ...
(MP) (a reworking of the theory out of the GB framework published by Chomsky in 1995)
Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:
*
Arc pair grammar In linguistics, arc pair grammar (APG) is a theory of syntax that aims to formalize and expand upon relational grammar. It primarily builds upon the relational grammar concept of an arc, but also makes use of more formally stated ideas from model t ...
*
Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG)
*
Generative semantics
Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generati ...
*
Head-driven phrase structure grammar Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar
developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor ...
(HPSG)
*
Lexical functional grammar (LFG)
*
Nanosyntax
*
Relational grammar
In linguistics, relational grammar (RG) is a syntactic theory which argues that primitive grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state syntactic rules in universal terms. Relational grammar began as an alternative to transformational gr ...
(RG)
*
Harmonic grammar (HG)
Cognitive and usage-based grammars
The Cognitive Linguistics framework stems from
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistic ...
but adheres to
evolutionary
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation t ...
, rather than
Chomskyan
Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is ...
, linguistics. Cognitive models often recognise the generative assumption that the object belongs to the verb phrase. Cognitive frameworks include the following:
*
Cognitive grammar
Cognitive grammar is a cognitive approach to language developed by Ronald Langacker, which hypothesizes that grammar, semantics, and lexicon exist on a continuum instead of as separate processes altogether. This approach to language was one of the ...
*
Construction grammar
Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...
(CxG)
*
Emergent grammar
See also
*
Cartographic syntax
*
List of syntactic phenomena
*
Metasyntax
In logic and computer science, a metasyntax describes the allowable structure and composition of phrases and sentences of a metalanguage, which is used to describe either a natural language or a computer programming language.Sellink, Alex, and Ch ...
*
Musical syntax
*
Semiotics
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies) is the systematic study of sign processes (semiosis) and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involves signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, ...
*
Syntactic category A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech (e.g. noun, verb, preposition, etc.), are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the ''phrasal ...
* ''
Syntax'' (
academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...
)
*
Syntax (programming languages)
In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that defines the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages ...
*
Syntax–Semantics Interface
*
Usage
The usage of a language is the ways in which its written and spoken variations are routinely employed by its speakers; that is, it refers to "the collective habits of a language's native speakers", as opposed to idealized models of how a languag ...
Syntactic terms
*
Adjective
In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...
*
Adjective phrase An adjective phrase (or adjectival phrase) is a phrase whose head is an adjective. Almost any grammar or syntax textbook or dictionary of linguistics terminology defines the adjective phrase in a similar way, e.g. Kesner Bland (1996:499), Crystal ( ...
*
Adjunct
Adjunct may refer to:
* Adjunct (grammar), words used as modifiers
* Adjunct professor, a rank of university professor
* Adjuncts, sources of sugar used in brewing
* Adjunct therapy used to complement another main therapeutic agent, either to impr ...
*
Adpositional phrase
An adpositional phrase, in linguistics, is a syntactic category that includes ''prepositional phrases'', ''postpositional phrases'', and ''circumpositional phrases''. Adpositional phrases contain an adposition (preposition, postposition, or ci ...
*
Adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering q ...
*
Anaphora
*
Answer ellipsis
*
Antecedent
An antecedent is a preceding event, condition, cause, phrase, or word.
The etymology is from the Latin noun ''antecedentem'' meaning "something preceding", which comes from the preposition ''ante'' ("before") and the verb ''cedere'' ("to go").
...
*
Antecedent-contained deletion Antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), also called antecedent-contained ellipsis, is a phenomenon whereby an elided verb phrase appears to be contained within its own antecedent. For instance, in the sentence "I read every book that you did", the ver ...
*
Appositive
*
Argument
An argument is a statement or group of statements called premises intended to determine the degree of truth or acceptability of another statement called conclusion. Arguments can be studied from three main perspectives: the logical, the dialect ...
*
Article
*
Aspect
*
Attributive adjective
In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...
and
predicative adjective
*
Auxiliary verb
An auxiliary verb ( abbreviated ) is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a ...
*
Binding
*
Branching
*
c-command
In generative grammar and related frameworks, a node in a parse tree c-commands its sister node and all of its sister's descendants. In these frameworks, c-command plays a central role in defining and constraining operations such as syntactic move ...
*
Case
Case or CASE may refer to:
Containers
* Case (goods), a package of related merchandise
* Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component
* Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books
* Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to c ...
*
Category
Category, plural categories, may refer to:
Philosophy and general uses
*Categorization, categories in cognitive science, information science and generally
* Category of being
* ''Categories'' (Aristotle)
* Category (Kant)
* Categories (Peirce) ...
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Catena
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Clause
In language, a clause is a constituent that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb wi ...
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Closed class
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are ass ...
word
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Comparative
general linguistics, the comparative is a syntactic construction that serves to express a comparison between two (or more) entities or groups of entities in quality or degree - see also comparison (grammar) for an overview of comparison, as well ...
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Complement
A complement is something that completes something else.
Complement may refer specifically to:
The arts
* Complement (music), an interval that, when added to another, spans an octave
** Aggregate complementation, the separation of pitch-clas ...
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Compound noun and adjective
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Conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
*Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
*Complex conjugation, the change ...
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Conjunction
Conjunction may refer to:
* Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech
* Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator
** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic
* Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...
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Constituent
Constituent or constituency may refer to:
Politics
* An individual voter within an electoral district, state, community, or organization
* Advocacy group or constituency
* Constituent assembly
* Constituencies of Namibia
Other meanings
* Cons ...
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Coordination
Coordination may refer to:
* Coordination (linguistics), a compound grammatical construction
* Coordination complex, consisting of a central atom or ion and a surrounding array of bound molecules or ions
* Coordination number or ligancy of a centr ...
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Coreference
In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in ''Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did'', the words ''Alice' ...
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Crossover
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Dangling modifier
A dangling modifier (also known as a dangling participle or illogical participle) is a type of ambiguous grammatical construct whereby a grammatical modifier could be misinterpreted as being associated with a word other than the one intended. A dan ...
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Declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...
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Dependency grammar
Dependency grammar (DG) is a class of modern grammatical theories that are all based on the dependency relation (as opposed to the ''constituency relation'' of phrase structure) and that can be traced back primarily to the work of Lucien Tesniè ...
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Dependent marking
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Determiner
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Discontinuity
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Do-support
''Do''-support (or ''do''-insertion), in English grammar, is the use of the auxiliary verb ''do'', including its inflected forms ''does'' and ''did'', to form negated clauses and questions as well as other constructions in which subject–auxili ...
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Dual
Dual or Duals may refer to:
Paired/two things
* Dual (mathematics), a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another
** Dual (category theory), a formalization of mathematical duality
*** see more cases in :Duality theories
* Dual (grammatical ...
(form for two)
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Ellipsis
The ellipsis (, also known informally as dot dot dot) is a series of dots that indicates an intentional omission of a word, sentence, or whole section from a text without altering its original meaning. The plural is ellipses. The term origin ...
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Endocentric
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Exceptional case-marking Exceptional case-marking (ECM), in linguistics, is a phenomenon in which the subject of an embedded infinitival verb seems to appear in a superordinate clause and, if it is a pronoun, is unexpectedly marked with object case morphology (''him'' not ' ...
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Expletive
Expletive may refer to:
* Expletive (linguistics), a word or phrase that is not needed to express the basic meaning of the sentence
*Expletive pronoun, a pronoun used as subject or other verb argument that is meaningless but syntactically required
...
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Extraposition
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Finite verb
Traditionally, a finite verb (from la, fīnītus, past participle of to put an end to, bound, limit) is the form "to which number and person appertain", in other words, those inflected for number and person. Verbs were originally said to be '' ...
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Function word
In linguistics, function words (also called functors) are words that have little lexical meaning or have ambiguous meaning and express grammatical relationships among other words within a sentence, or specify the attitude or mood of the speaker ...
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Gapping
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Gender
Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures us ...
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Gerund
In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifi ...
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Government
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government ...
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Head
A head is the part of an organism which usually includes the ears, brain, forehead, cheeks, chin, eyes, nose, and mouth, each of which aid in various sensory functions such as sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Some very simple animals may no ...
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Head marking
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Infinitive
Infinitive ( abbreviated ) is a linguistics term for certain verb forms existing in many languages, most often used as non-finite verbs. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. The word is de ...
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Inverse copular construction
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Inversion
Inversion or inversions may refer to:
Arts
* , a French gay magazine (1924/1925)
* ''Inversion'' (artwork), a 2005 temporary sculpture in Houston, Texas
* Inversion (music), a term with various meanings in music theory and musical set theory
* ...
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Lexical item
In lexicography, a lexical item is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words ( catena) that forms the basic elements of a language's lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are ''cat'', ''traffic light'', ''take care of'', ''by the way ...
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Logical form (linguistics)
In generative grammar and related approaches, the logical form (LF) of a linguistic expression is the variant of its syntactic structure which undergoes semantic interpretation. It is distinguished from '' phonetic form'', the structure which c ...
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m-command
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Measure word
In linguistics, measure words are words (or morphemes) that are used in combination with a numeral to indicate an amount of something represented by some noun.
Description
Measure words denote a unit or measurement and are used with mass nouns ...
(classifier)
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Merge
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Modal particle
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Modal verb
A modal verb is a type of verb that contextually indicates a modality such as a ''likelihood'', ''ability'', ''permission'', ''request'', ''capacity'', ''suggestion'', ''order'', ''obligation'', or ''advice''. Modal verbs generally accompany the ...
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Modifier
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Mood
Mood may refer to:
*Mood (psychology), a relatively long lasting emotional state
Music
*The Mood, a British pop band from 1981 to 1984
* Mood (band), hip hop artists
* ''Mood'' (Jacquees album), 2016
* ''Moods'' (Barbara Mandrell album), 1978
...
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Movement
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Movement paradox
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Nanosyntax
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Negative inversion
In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject–auxiliary inversion in English. A negation (e.g. ''not'', ''no'', ''never'', ''nothing'', etc.) or a word that implies negation (''only'', ''hardly'', ''scarcely'') or a phrase c ...
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Non-configurational language
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Non-finite verb
A nonfinite verb is a derivative form of a verb unlike finite verbs. Accordingly, nonfinite verb forms are inflected for neither number nor person, and they cannot perform action as the root of an independent clause. In English, nonfinite verbs i ...
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Noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Organism, Living creatures (including people ...
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Noun ellipsis
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Noun phrase
In linguistics, a noun phrase, or nominal (phrase), is a phrase that has a noun or pronoun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently o ...
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Number
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers ...
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Object
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Open class word
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Parasitic gap
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Part of speech
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech ( abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are as ...
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Particle
In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass.
They vary greatly in size or quantity, fro ...
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Periphrasis
In linguistics, periphrasis () is the use of one or more function words to express meaning that otherwise may be expressed by attaching an affix or clitic to a word. The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one i ...
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Person
A person (plural, : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of pr ...
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Personal pronoun
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person (as ''I''), second person (as ''you''), or third person (as ''he'', ''she'', ''it'', ''they''). Personal pronouns may also take dif ...
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Pied-piping
In linguistics, pied-piping is a phenomenon of syntax whereby a given focused expression brings along an encompassing phrase with it when it is moved.
The term was introduced by John Robert Ross in 1967. It references the legend of the Pied Pip ...
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Phrasal verb
In the traditional grammar of Modern English, a phrasal verb typically constitutes a single semantic unit composed of a verb followed by a particle (examples: ''turn down'', ''run into'' or ''sit up''), sometimes combined with a preposition (e ...
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Phrase
In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can con ...
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Phrase structure grammar
The term phrase structure grammar was originally introduced by Noam Chomsky as the term for grammar studied previously by Emil Post and Axel Thue ( Post canonical systems). Some authors, however, reserve the term for more restricted grammars in ...
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Plural
The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
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Predicate
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Predicative expression
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Preposition and postposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
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Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would n ...
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Pseudogapping
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Raising
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Grammatical relation
In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional gra ...
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Restrictiveness
In semantics, a modifier is said to be restrictive (or ''defining'') if it restricts the reference of its head. For example, in "the red car is fancier than the blue one", ''red'' and ''blue'' are restrictive, because they restrict which cars '' ...
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Right node raising In linguistics, the term right node raising (RNR) denotes a sharing mechanism that sees the material to the immediate right of parallel structures being in some sense "shared" by those parallel structures, e.g. '' am likesbut red dislikesthe debate ...
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Sandhi
Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
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Scrambling
Scrambling is a mountaineering term for ascending steep terrain using one's hands to assist in holds and balance.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. It is also used to describe terrain that falls between hiking and rock climbing (as a “scram ...
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Selection
Selection may refer to:
Science
* Selection (biology), also called natural selection, selection in evolution
** Sex selection, in genetics
** Mate selection, in mating
** Sexual selection in humans, in human sexuality
** Human mating strat ...
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Sentence
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Separable verb
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Shifting
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Singular
Singular may refer to:
* Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms
* Singular homology
* SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS)
* Singular or sounder, a group of boar ...
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Sluicing
In syntax, sluicing is a type of ellipsis that occurs in both direct and indirect interrogative clauses. The ellipsis is introduced by a ''wh''-expression, whereby in most cases, everything except the ''wh''-expression is elided from the clause. ...
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Small clause
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Stripping
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Subcategorization
In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items (usually verbs) to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur. The notion of subcategorization is similar to the notio ...
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Subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
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Subject-auxiliary inversion
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Subject-verb inversion
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Subordination
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Superlative
Comparison is a feature in the morphology or syntax of some languages whereby adjectives and adverbs are inflected to indicate the relative degree of the property they define exhibited by the word or phrase they modify or describe. In language ...
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Tense
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Topicalization
Topicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position further to the right). This involves a phrasa ...
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Tough movement
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Uninflected word
In linguistic morphology, an uninflected word is a word that has no morphological markers (inflection) such as affixes, ablaut, consonant gradation, etc., indicating declension or conjugation. If a word has an uninflected form, this is usually th ...
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V2 word order
In syntax, verb-second (V2) word order is a sentence structure in which the finite verb of a sentence or a clause is placed in the clause's second position, so that the verb is preceded by a single word or group of words (a single constituent) ...
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Valency
Valence or valency may refer to:
Science
* Valence (chemistry), a measure of an element's combining power with other atoms
* Degree (graph theory), also called the valency of a vertex in graph theory
* Valency (linguistics), aspect of verbs re ...
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Verb
A verb () is a word ( part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descr ...
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Verb phrase
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause. Thus, in the sentence ''A fat man quickly put the money into the box'', the words ''qu ...
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Verb phrase ellipsis
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Voice
The human voice consists of sound made by a human being using the vocal tract, including talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming, shouting, humming or yelling. The human voice frequency is specifically a part of human sound production ...
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Wh-movement
In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...
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Word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
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X-bar theory
In linguistics, X-bar theory is a model of phrase-structure grammar and a theory of syntactic category formation that was first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1970Chomsky, Noam (1970). Remarks on Nominalization. In: R. Jacobs and P. Rosenbaum (eds.) ...
References
Citations
Sources
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* An interdisciplinary essay on the interplay between logic and linguistics on syntactic theories.
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Further reading
* 5 Volumes; 77 case studies of syntactic phenomena.
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* Attempts to be a theory-neutral introduction. The companion surveys the major theories. Jointly reviewed in
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* part II: Computational approaches to syntax.
External links
The syntax of natural language: An online introduction using the Trees programeatrice Santorini & Anthony Kroch,
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universit ...
, 2007
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