Syntax: Difference between revisions
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In Linguistics, '''syntax''' is "the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages"<ref> Chomsky, Noam. [1957]. Syntactic Structures. p. 11.</ref>. It assumes that: | |||
*natural language sentences can be broken down into components (the so-called syntactic constituents); | |||
*the resulting structure (i.e., the relations between syntactic constituents) is hierarchical (a tree-like structure) rather than a simple list; and | |||
*the structure can be predicted by rules (i.e., the structure is regular), which consist the grammar of the language. | |||
For instance, the sentence: | |||
<blockquote>''they killed the man''</blockquote> | |||
is more productively represented as (1) than (2) | |||
{|align=center | |||
|- | |||
|align=center|[[file:syntax.png]] | |||
|width=20%| | |||
|align=center|'''[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man]''' | |||
|- | |||
|align=center|(1) | |||
|width=20%| | |||
|align=center|(2) | |||
|} | |||
== Notes == | |||
<references /> | |||
Revision as of 19:26, 13 August 2013
In Linguistics, syntax is "the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages"[1]. It assumes that:
- natural language sentences can be broken down into components (the so-called syntactic constituents);
- the resulting structure (i.e., the relations between syntactic constituents) is hierarchical (a tree-like structure) rather than a simple list; and
- the structure can be predicted by rules (i.e., the structure is regular), which consist the grammar of the language.
For instance, the sentence:
they killed the man
is more productively represented as (1) than (2)
|
[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man] | |
| (1) | (2) |
Notes
- ↑ Chomsky, Noam. [1957]. Syntactic Structures. p. 11.
