Linguistics

1. Introduction

2.  *Syntax is the study of sentence structure in a language.
Scope- Types of sentences, phrases, clause, agreement and word
order etc.
 Syntax is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern
the structure of sentences in a given language specifically word
order.
 The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic
rules common to all languages.

3.  Works on grammar were written long before
modern syntax came about.
 Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini (c. 4th century BC) is a
pre-modern work that approaches the
sophistication of a modern syntactic theory.

4.  A basic feature of a language's syntax is the sequence in which
the subject (S), verb (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,
the last three of which are rare.

5.  *A phrase is a collection of words that may have nouns,
but it does not have a subject doing a verb.
 Phrases are considered as the second level of classification
as they tend to be larger than individual words, but are
smaller than sentences.
 We refer to the central element in a phrase as the head of
the phrase. If the head is a noun then the phrase is called a
noun phrase.

6. Example
1. Noun -----My coach is happy. (noun phrase as subject)
2. Verb -------Henry made my coach very proud. (verb phrase as
predicate)
3. Adjectival------Dad bought [(a blue and green) sweater]
4. Adverbial------ He scored the goal very quickly.
5. Prepositional -------The man in the house rented it.
(prepositional phrase modifies a noun adjectivally)
6. Gerundive-------- Dad talked about winning the game.
7. Participial-------- Racing around the corner, he slipped and fell.
8. Infinitive------- My duty as a coach is to teach skills. (infinitive
phrase functions as a noun) My sister wanted a cat to love.
(infinitive phrase functions as an adjective)

7. A sentence is:
‘a sequence of words whose first word starts with
a capital letter and whose last word is followed
by an end punctuation mark (period/full stop,
question mark or exclamation mark)'

8. • All sentences are about something or someone.
• The something or someone that the sentence is
about is called the subject of the sentence.
• The predicate contains information about the
someone or something that is the subject.
• Examples.
John often comes late to class.
My friend and I both have a dog named Spot.

11. Construction refers to the overall process organization of
grammatical unit.
Example:
The old dog lay in the corner.
The above sentence contains two composite forms i.e.,
The Old dog and lay in the corner.

12.  Constituent is a combination of morphemes it is also
said that words which we use in construction.
 a constituent of a linguistic construction at the
first step in an analysis; for example, the
immediate constituents of a sentence are the subject
and the predicate.

13. Immediate constituent analysis or IC
analysis is a method of sentence analysis that
was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield.