The Explanation About ENGLISH SYNTAX

The term 'syntax' has been defined by many linguists. Crystal (1980:346) defines syntax as the study of the rules governing the way words are combined to form sentences in a language. In this use, syntax is opposed to morphology, the study of word structure. An alternative definition is the study of the interrelationships between elements of sentence structure, and of the rules governing the -arrangement of sentences in sequences. Paul Roberts (1964:1) defines syntax as the area of grammar which is concerned with the relationships of words in sentences, the ways in which they are put together to form sentences. Francis (1958:31) states that syntax is a subdivision of grammar which deals with the structure of word groups. Fromkin & Rodman (1983:200) state that syntax is the part of our linguistic knowledge which concerns with the structure of sentences. O'Grady & Dobrovolsky (1989:126) define syntax as the system of rules and categories that allows words to be combined to form sentences. Finally, Gleason (1955:128) defines syntax as the principles of arrangement of the constructions formed by the process of derivation and inflection (words) into larger constructions of various kinds.

From all the definitions cited above, we can conclude that syntax is the study of the interrelationships of words in word groups. In other words, we can say that syntax is concerned with the structure of word groups.

Construction

To make clear what a construction is, in the following some definitions of it are given. According to Gleason (1961:132), a construction is any significant group of words (or morphemes). Crystal (1980:85) states that in its most general senses in linguistics, construction refers to the overall process of internal organization of a grammatical unit - a sentence, for example, being constructed out of a set of morphemes by the application of a set of rules. More specifically it refers to the syntagmatic result of such a process, a particular type of construction (a constructional type or pattern) being defined as å sequence of units which has a functional identity in the grammar of a language. Furthermore, Hockett (1958:164) states that a construction is a pattern for building composite forms of a specific form-class out of, ICs of specific form-classes. The sentence The old dog lay in the corner contains two composite forms, old dog and lay in the corner, built by different constructions but showing certain similarities. In terms of meaning, an old dog is the kind of dog, and lying in the corner is the kind of lying. In each case, one of the ICs modifies the meaning of the other.

Immediate Constituent

Gleason (1961:133) defines an immediate constituent as one of the two, or a few, constituents of which any given construction is directly formed, For example the old man who lives there and has gone to his son's house are immediate constituents of the utterance The old man who lives there has gone to his son's house. Old man is an IC of old man who lives there, but not of the utterance as a whole. The ICs of a given construction are the constituents o e next lower level. Those on any lower level are constituents but not immediate constituents.

We can therefore define a constituent as any syntactical unit which combines with another syntactical unit to form a construction. A construction can be defined as any syntactical unit containing constituents. For example, the construction the girl in the room is itself made up of eight constituents: one prepositional phrase, two noun phrases, and five words. Only two of these, however, (the girl and in the room), are immediate constituents. Each of these constituents is itself a construction made up of its own two ICs (the + girt, in + the room), and so on.

Immediate Constituent Analysis

The immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis), first developed by Leonard Bloomfield, is an important methodological tool for syntactic analysis. According to the IC analysis, a sentence must be cut into its two immediate constituents. If one or both of the immediate constituents consist of constructions, then they must be further cut into their immediate constituents until single words are reached. The last string of constituents (words) are called the ultimate constituents. To illustrate this procedure, an example is given in the following.

The sentence “The pretty girls in the car are smiling gaily”, can be analyzed by using a tree diagram as follows:

As IC analysis shows, English sentences are constructed in an organized, patterned way. The smallest unit at the syntactical level of structural grammar analysis is the word, and the largest unit is the sentence. Within these lower and upper limits, the sentence is the only unit that is not a constituent and the word is the only unit that is not a construction. All units in between are both constructions and constituents, depending upon which level of sentence analysis is being discussed.