Sintax

     Languages have rules. The rules of a language are called the grammar. The reason for these rules is that a person needs to be able to speak an indeterminately large number of sentences in a lifetime. The effort would be impossibly great if each sentence had to be learnt separately.

     By learning the rules for connecting words it is possible to create an infinite number of sentences, all of which are meaningful to a person who knows the syntax. Thus it is possible to construct many sentences that the speaker has never heard before.

Definition of syntax:

     Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis.   (Chomsky, 2002).
     Syntax is that part of our linguistics knowledge which concerns the structure of sentences. Knowing a language also means being able to put words together to form sentences to express our thoughts. (Fromkin and Rodman,1983)

What is Syntax?

   The part of linguistics that studies sentence structure:

  1. word order:

            I want these books.

   * want these I books.

2. agreement – subject and verb, determiner and noun, . . . often must agree:

            He wants this book.

            *He want this book.

            *want these books.

            *I want this books.

 3. How many complements, which prepositions and forms (cases):

              I  give Mary a book.

             *I see Mary a book.

            I see her 

           *I see she.

    4. hierarchical structure – what modifies what

        We need more (intelligent leaders).
        (more of intelligent leaders)

        We need (more intelligent) leaders.
        (leaders that are more intelligent)