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1 Some Concepts and Misconception: Understanding Syntax Chapter One P: 1 - 24 1-What Is Syntax?
1 Some Concepts and Misconception: Understanding Syntax Chapter One P: 1 - 24 1-What Is Syntax?
1- What is syntax?
My aim is to help you the way syntax works in languages, and to introduce
the most important syntactic concepts and technical terms.
We always find it easier to learn languages that are closely related to our
own, or that are similar TYPOLOGICALLY to our own - that is, languages which have
common features in their type, such as sharing the same word order. So saying a
language is hard really means that it has a lot of unfamiliar features. Greek isn't
intrinsically hard, and neither is Swahili or Mohawk or any other language, although
languages certainly differ with respect to which of their grammatical features are the
hardest for children to learn as native speakers.
By the age of around seven, children have a fairly complete knowledge of the
grammar of their native languages, and most of what happens after that age is
learning more vocabulary. Once the grammar is fully learnt, it can't be improved
upon. We can think of this as parallel to learning' how to walk. Children can't be
taught to walk; we all do it naturally when we're ready, and we can't say how we do
it. Even if we come to understand exactly what muscle movements are required, and
what brain circuitry is involved, we still don't 'know' how we walk. Learning our
native language is just the same: it happens without outside intervention, and the
resulting knowledge is inaccessible to us.
All normal children in every culture can learn their native language or languages to
perfection without any formal teaching. Most linguists now believe that, in order to
do this, human infants are born pre-programmed to learn language, in just the same
way as we are pre-programmed to walk.
Of course, this isn't true. First, a speaker who uses a sentence like this doesn't
intend it to mean I did something wrong. Nor would any of their addressees,
however much they despise the double negative, understand it to mean / did
something wrong.
This gap can be filled by may, might, must, can, could, will, would, shall,
should as well as dare and need. By changing leave to left or leaving we can
also add have and be to the list of words that can fit the gap, as in / have not
left, I am not leaving. In Modern English only words of a certain class, a verb-
like word known as an AUXILIARY, can be directly negated by not. Where
there is no other auxiliary, do is used as a kind of 'dummy' auxiliary. And
making questions can be done by placing the model verbs in the first place
and in case of changing the form of the verb "leave" we can add to just like in:
The second reason for looking at examples from other languages is that
linguists want to discover the common properties that languages share - their
homogeneity or sameness. One of the most important discoveries of modern
linguistics is that languages don't vary from each other at random, but are
remarkably alike. Certain features occur in all languages. For instance, every
language distinguishes a word class of NOUNS (words like tree, liquid, expression and
student) from a word class of VERBS (words like liquefy, learn, enjoy and grow),
although some languages have no other major word classes. To discover this kind of
information, linguists need to examine a representative sample of languages from
different language families and different geographical areas.
Other example; Apart from the lexical and grammatical information, the gloss
also contains colons (:) and dashes (-). I glossed these as DEM:PL: these is a
DEMONSTRATIVE word, a 'pointing' word from the set this, that, these, those. It's
also PLURAL, therefore used before a plural word like books. The colon in the gloss
DEM:PL means you can't separate the bit of the word that means 'plural' from the
bit that means 'demonstrative': these is simultaneously 'demonstrative' and 'plural';
some authors use a plus sign (+) or a full stop (.) in place of a colon.
In English, what is known as WORD ORDER is pretty fixed. There are three
main elements in the sentence in the below e.g. Kim, the one drinking the tea;
drank, the verb which expresses what Kim did; and the tea, expressing what is being
drunk. The term 'word order' is used to discuss the order in which these three main
parts of a sentence occur in a language.
The other elements are impossible to form or be occurred in English while in other
languages they are occurred.
1.3.2 Promotion and demotion processes
The syntactic variations involved simply reordering the elements of a
sentence. But syntactic changes can have much more radical results than this.
Let's assume that active sentences are the more basic; they are, for instance,
learnt much earlier by children than are passives. Two properties of the passive are
common to any language which has the construction: (i) the passive involves
PROMOTION of an object phrase to a special position in the sentence, known as the
SUBJECT position, and (ii) the phrase that used to be in the subject position
undergoes DEMOTION. The passive signaled by changes in the form of the verb and
the place of the object as in the example;
Languages have embedded sentences that is to say, we can release there are
no limits to the number of embedded sentences that can be strung together.
Languages sentences also have number of rules that we can replace other words for
example; one may say:
Even though pairs of sentences like those in look the same, they do in fact have
different structures.