The document discusses the study of syntax and grammar, emphasizing the rules governing the formation of phrases and sentences in a natural language. It outlines the hierarchical structure of grammatical units, including morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, and highlights the significance of word order in determining meaning. Additionally, it introduces syntactic categories, constituents, and basic phrase structure rules essential for understanding sentence construction.

1. SYNTAX
PHRASES AND CLAUSES

2. GRAMMAR
is the study of the rules governing the use of a
given natural language, and, as such, is a field
of linguistics (the scientific study of language).
Traditionally, grammar included morphology
and syntax.
In modern liguistics these subfields are complemented
by phonetics, phonology, semantics and pragmatics.

3. Review: The Five Grammatical Units
Halliday’s Hierarchy
1. The Sentence: one or more clauses
2. The Clause: one or more phrases
3. The Phrase: one or more words
4. The Word: one or more morphemes
5. The Morpheme: the smallest unit in form and
meaning
Identify the Units: “The child found the puppy while he
was walking along the river.”

4. WHAT IS ‘SYNTAX’?
• Knowing a language includes the ability to
construct phrases and sentences/clauses out
of morphemes and words. The part of the
grammar that represents a speaker’s
knowledge of these structures and their
formation is called Syntax!
• In other words, syntax is the study of
sentence patterns of language.

5. The aim of this study is to show you what
syntactic structure is and what the rules that
determine syntactic structure are like.
What meant by structure here, is ‘word order’.
The meaning of a sentence depends on the
order in which words occur in a sentence.

6. Compare the following sentences:
I sing because I am happy.
I am happy because I sing.
The two sentences above have the same
categories and number of words, but
different in structure (words order); thus,
they have different meanings.

7. SYNTACTIC CATEGORY
Syntactic category is a set of words and/or
phrases in language which share a significant
number of common characteristics.

8. Syntactic categories commonly include:
1. Parts of Speech (Determiner, Adjective, Noun,
Pronoun, Preposition, Adverb, Auxiliary, Verb etc.)
2. Phrase Structure Grammars (Noun Phrase, Adjective
Phrase, Verb Phrase, Adverb Phrase, Preposition
Phrase)
3. Sentence – the core of the structure

10. SYNTACTIC LABELS
Sentence [S]
Determiner [Det]
Adjective [Adj]
Adverb [Adv]
Noun [N]
Verb [V]
Pronoun [Pro]
Preposition [P]
Auxiliary Verb [Aux]
Preposition Phrase [PP]
Adverb Phrase [AdvP]
Adjective Phrase [AdjP]
Noun Phrase [NP]
Verb Phrase [VP]

11. up
PHRASE STRUCTURE TREE / CONSTITUENT STRUCTURE TREE

13. BASIC PHRASE STRUCTURE RULES:
 S  NP VP
 NP  (Det) (Adj) N (PP)
 VP  V (NP) (PP) (Adv)
 PP  P NP

14. Constituents
According to Syntax, the component parts of
the a sentence are called constituents, which
are the natural groupings of a sentence.
 Each of them has:
1.Grammatical Category: whether it is a noun phrase, a
verb phrase, etc.
2.Grammatical Function: whether it is the subject,
object, or predicate, etc.

15. Grammatical Function & Category
The Subject: To study grammar is fun. [Category: Infinitive]
The Predicate: I cried. [Intransitive Verb]
The Subjective Complement: It was dark. [Adjective]
The Direct Object: He loves reading. [Gerund]
The Indirect Object: I gave the beggar a coin. [Noun Phrase]
The Objective Complement:
I found the box empty. [Adjective]

16. A Constituent is formed if…
1. Constituent can stand alone
Ex. “What did you find?” “A puppy.” (not “found a”)
2. Constituents can be replaced by one word
Ex. “Where did you find the puppy?”
“I found him along the river.”
3. Constituents move together
Ex. “It was the puppy that the child found.”
“The puppy was found by the child.”