Syntax 1 The part of the grammar that

Syntax 1. The part of the grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and their structures is called syntax. 2. Structure means word order. Eg. ”She has what a man wants” does not mean the same as, ”She wants what a man has”.

Syntax 3. The grammar of all languages include rules of syntax. 4. When someone speaks, his/her speech will reflect knowledge of the rules. Eg. He no go there. He does not go there. What can you say about the above ?

A Sentence 5. In every language, every sentence is a sequence of words but not every sequence of words is a sentence. Eg. The girl likes the boy. The likes boy girl the. Which one is a sentence and which one is not? 6. To be a sentence, words must conform to the syntactic rules of the language.

Grammatical/Ungrammatical Sentences 7. Some sentences sound funny, and do not make much sense but they are not wrong because they are syntactically well formed. Eg. The animals in pink socks danced very well. 8. We are able to make grammatical judgements based on our unconscious knowledge of the syntactic rules of grammar. 9. Syntactic knowledge helps us decide whether a sentence is ambiguous or it has multiple meanings. Eg. Synthetic buffalo hides. 10. Thus syntactic knowledge in a grammar accounts for the following: a)The grammaticality of the sentence. b)Word order c)Hierarchical organization of sentences. d)Grammatical relations such as subject and object e)Whether different structures have differing meanings or the same meaning. f)The creative aspect of language.