Syntax
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|align=center|'''[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man]''' | |align=center|'''[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man]''' | ||
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Revision as of 20:58, 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)
|
width=20% | [they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man] |
| (1) | width=20% | (2) |
Notes
- ↑ Chomsky, Noam. [1957]. Syntactic Structures. p. 11.
