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SYNTAX

comes originally from Greek

and means “a putting together” or “arrangement.” In earlier approaches, there

was an attempt to produce an accurate description of the sequence or ordering

“arrangement” of elements in the linear structure of the sentence. More recent

attempts to analyze structure have focused on the underlying rule

system that we use to produce or “generate” sentences.

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When we set out to provide an analysis of the syntax of a language, we try to adhere to the

“All and only” criterion. This means that our analysis must account for all the

grammatically correct phrases and sentences and only those grammatically correct phrases

and sentences in whatever language we are analyzing. In other words, if we write rules for

the creation of well-formed structures, we have to check that those rules, when applied

logically, won’t also lead to ill-formed structures.

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we might say informally that, in English, we put a preposition (near)

before a noun (London) to form a prepositional phrase (near London). This will describe a

large number of phrases, but does it describe all (and only) the prepositional phrases in

English? Note that, if we use this as a grammar rule to create structures involving a

preposition and a noun, we will produce phrases like near tree or with dog.

These don’t seem to be well-formed English structures, so we mark them with an asterisk *,

indicating that they are ungrammatical.

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the form of curly brackets {}. These indicate that only one of the elements enclosed within the curly brackets must be selected.

we can write three separate rules, as shown on the left, but it is more succinct to

write one rule, on the right, using curly brackets.

NP → Art (Adj) N

NP → Pro NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}

NP → PN.

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The first rule in the following set of simple (and necessarily incomplete) phrase

structure rules capture a very general rule of English sentence structure: “a sentence (S)

rewrites as a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP).”

The second rule states that “a

noun phrase rewrites as either an article plus an optional adjective plus a noun, or a

pronoun, or a proper noun.”

In the third rule, a verb phrase rewrites as a verb plus a noun

phrase.

S → NP VP

NP → {Art (Adj) N, Pro, PN}

VP → V NP

Lexical Rules

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we also need lexical rules that specify which words can be used when we rewrite constituents such as PN. The first rule in the following set states that “a proper

noun rewrites as John or Mary.” (It is a very small world.)

PN → {John, Mary} Art → {a, the}

N → {girl, dog, boy} Adj → {big, small}

V → {followed, helped, saw} Pro → {it, you}

We can rely on these rules to generate the grammatical sentences shown below in (1)–

(6), but not the ungrammatical sentences shown in (7)–(12).

(1) A dog followed the boy. (7) *Dog followed the boy.

(2) You saw it. (8) *You it saw.

(3) John saw the big dog. (9) *John Mary small dog

(4) It followed Mary. (10) *Followed Mary the dog big.

(5) The small boy helped you. (11) *The helped you boy

(6) Mary helped John. (12 *Mary John helped

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When we have an effective rule such as “a prepositional phrase in English consists of a

preposition followed by a noun phrase,” we can imagine an extremely large number of

English phrases that could be produced using this rule. The potential number is unlimited. This reflects another goal of syntactic analysis, which is to have a small and

finite (i.e. limited) set of rules that will be capable of producing a large and potentially

infinite (i.e. unlimited) number of well-formed structures.

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This small and finite set of rules

is sometimes described as a generative grammar because it can be used to “generate” or

produce sentence structures and not just describe them.

This type of grammar should also be capable of revealing the basis of two other

phenomena: first, how some superficially different phrases and sentences are closely related

and, second, how some superficially similar phrases and sentences are different.

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superficially different sentences: Charlie broke the window and The window was broken by

Charlie. In traditional grammar, the first is called an active sentence, focusing on what

Charlie did, and the second is a passive sentence, focusing on The window and what happened to it. The distinction between them is a difference in their surface structure, that is, the different syntactic forms they have as individual English sentences. However, this

superficial difference in form disguises the fact that the two sentences are closely related,

even identical, at a less superficial level.

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where the basic components (Noun Phrase + Verb +

Noun Phrase) shared by the two sentences can be represented, is called their deep structure. The deep structure is an abstract level of structural organization in which all the

elements determining structural interpretation are represented. That same deep structure

can be the source of many other surface structures such as It was Charlie who broke the

window and Was the window broken by Charlie?. In short, the grammar must be capable of

showing how a single underlying abstract representation can become different surface

structures.