This document discusses syntax, which is the study of the structure of phrases and sentences. It addresses two key principles of sentence organization: linear order and hierarchical structure. Linear order refers to the specific sequence of words that determine a sentence's grammaticality and meaning. Hierarchical structure refers to the way words are organized into nested constituent groupings within a sentence, with the smallest constituents being individual words and the largest being the sentence itself. Tree diagrams can be used to represent a sentence's syntactic structure and constituent relationships.

1. By the end of this chapter….

2. Think ????? What is that enables us to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences?

4. Syntax: the structure and function of phrases and sentences Definition The study of syntax addresses the structure of sentences and their structural and functional relationships to one another. Functional perspective: From the functional perspective point of view, the sentence has a daughter or bought an answering machine are predicates. From a grammatical point of view, these are verb phrases.

6. syntax But this analysis misses the point? This analysis is similar to describing a shopping mall…Why? The point in any analysis is to identify the structural units that are relevant to some purpose or level of organization. In analyzing sentences, those structural units are called CONSTITUENTS.

8. For example, consider the sentence in (4). (4) Many executives eat at really fancy restaurants. We can easily distinguish a number of meaningful groups of words in this sentence: many executives and eat at really fancy restaurants, for instance, clearly have meanings of their own, and each makes a coherent contribution to the meaning of (4) as a whole. For these reasons, they are constituents of this sentence. On the other hand, some groups of words in sentence (4) do not naturally form meaningful units; executives eat at and eat at really, for example, don't clearly have meanings of their own. Thus, these groups of words are not constituents of (4).

9. Tree diagram One way of representing syntactic relationship is with TREE DIAGRAMS. S N V N Harry liked Sonya

10. Syntax