LING101 Lecture 6: March 20th- Syntax
21 Mar 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Syntax is one component of the grammar. Given a set of words, such as the, a, cat, rat, chased, only certain orders are grammatical. The syntax of a language determines grammatical and ungrammatical orders. The syntactic structure of an expression also reflect the order in which words are combined (thereby reflecting meaning) The grammaticality of a syntactic structure is not dependent on meaning. Native speakers share intuitions about even nonsensical sentences. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously - structure is good even if meaning is bad. Grammatical relations and syntactic position are distinct. Sentences with the same meaning may have more than one grammatical order. In both sentences below, the cat is the chaser and the rat is the chasee. Just as words can be ambiguous (lexical ambiguity), phrases can be as well (structural ambiguity) A clause can be placed inside another clause. A noun phrase can be placed inside another noun phrase.
