Syntax

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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)

Syntax.png [they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man]
(1) (2)

Immediate Constituent Analysis

In linguistics, immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis is a method of sentence analysis that was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield[2] and developed further by Rulon Wells[3]. The process reached a full blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the early works of Noam Chomsky[1]. The practice is now widespread. Most tree structures employed to represent the syntactic structure of sentences are products of some form of IC-analysis. The process and result of IC-analysis can, however, vary greatly based upon whether one chooses the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars (= constituency grammars) or the dependency relation of dependency grammars as the underlying principle that organizes constituents into hierarchical structures.

Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 Chomsky, Noam. [1957]. Syntactic Structures. p. 11.
  2. Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Henry Holt
  3. Wells, Rulon S. 1947. "Immediate Constituents." Language: 23. pp. 81–117.
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