FOUNDATION OF LINGUISTICS

SYNTAX AND GRAMMAR

COMPILED BY :
SUMIYATI (NPM. 11211210381)
NUNING RACHMAWATI (NPM. 11211210337)
NOVITA LINDASARI (NPM. 11211210011)
NOVIA SUSANTI (NPM. 11211210852)
PUTRI SINTA (NPM. 11211210022)
VENNY JULISTIANA DEWI (NPM. 11211210576)
GROUP IV
FAKULTAS KEGURUAN DAN ILMU PENDIDIKAN
JURUSAN PENDIDIKAN BAHASA DAN SENI
PROGRAM STUDI PENDIDIKAN BAHASA INGGRIS
UNIVERSITAS IBN KHALDUN BOGOR
2012

SYNTAX AND GRAMMAR

I. SYNTAX: THE SENTENCE PATTERNS OF LANGUAGE
Knowing a language includes the ability to construct phrases and
sentence out of morphemes and words. The part of the grammar that
represents a speaker's knowledge of these structures and their formation is
called syntax.
1. Grammatical Or Ungrammatical
In English and in every language, every sentence is a sequence of
words, but not every sequence of words is a sentence. Sequences of
words that conform to the rules of syntax are said to be well formed or
grammatical and those that violate the syntactic rules are therefore ill
formed or ungrammatical
2. Syntactic Structure
Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence, and how
the words are grouped. The syntactic rules in a grammar must at least
account for:
1. The grammaticality of sentences
2. Word order
3. Structural ambiguity
4. Grammatical relations
5. Whether different structures have differing meanings or the same
meaning
6. The creative aspect of language
3. Syntactic Categories
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without
loss of grammaticality is called a syntactic category.

4. Symbols Used In Syntactic Description

There are three more symbols that are commonly used in syntactic
description.
The first is in the form of an arrow. It can be interpreted as
consists of or rewrites as. It is typically used in the following type of
rule:
NPArt N
This is simply a shorthand way of saying that a noun phrase (NP)
such as the dog consists of or rewrites as () an article (Art) the and a
noun (N) dog.
The second symbol is a pair of round brackets ( ). Whatever occurs
inside these round brackets will be treated as an optional constituent. For
example, we can describe an object as the dog or the small dog. We can
say that both the dog and the small dog are examples category noun
phrase (NP). When we want to use a noun phrase in English, we can
include an adjective (Adj) such as small, but we do not have to. It is an
optional constituent in a grammatically well-formed noun phrase. We can
represent this observation in the following type of rule:
NPArt (Adj) N
This shorthand notation expresses the idea that a noun phrase
rewrites as () an article (Art) and a noun (N), with the option of
including an adjective (Adj) in a specific position between them. We use
the round brackets to indicate that the adjective is optional.
The third symbol is in the form of curly brackets { }. These indicate
that only one of the elements enclosed within the curly brackets must be
selected. We use these types of brackets when we want to indicate that
there is a choice from two or more constituents. For example, we saw
that a noun phrase can consist of an expression such as the dog (article
plus noun), or it (pronoun), or Cathy (proper noun), we can try to capture
this observation about English with three separate rules, as shown on the
left. However, it is more succinct to write one rule, as shown in the

middle or on the right, using curly brackets and including exactly the
same information.
NP Art N
NP Pro

Art N
NP

NP PN
5.

Pro

NP { Art N, Pro, PN }

PN

Tree Diagram
To create a more explicit representation of the hierarchical
organization of one structure, shown in a labeled and bracketed format on
the left below, we can use a tree diagram, shown on the right below.
NP

NP

Art

(The)

(girl)

Art

The

girl

6. Phrase Structure Rule

An alternative view is to treat the tree diagram as a dynamic
format, in the sense that it represents a way of generating not only that
one sentence, but a very large number of other sentences with similar
structures. This second approach is very appealing because it would
enable us to generate a very large number of sentences with what look
like a very small number of rules.
7. Lexical rules
Phrase structure rules generate structures. In order to turn those
structures into recognizable English, we also need lexical rules that
specify which words can be used when we rewrite constituents such as N.
8. Transformational Rules
Rules that will change or move constituents in the structures derived
from the phrase structure rules. These are called transformational rules.

II. GRAMMAR
The process of describing the structure of phrases and sentences in such a
way that we account for all the grammatical sequences in a language and rule
out all the ungrammatical sequences is one way of defining grammar. We
recognize that the phrase the lucky boys is a well-formed phrase in English,
but that the following two phrases are not at all well-formed.
*boys the lucky *lucky boys the
(we use asterisk * to indicate that a form is unacceptable or ungrammatical.
from these examples, we can see that English has strict rules for combining
word into phrases. the article (the) must go before the adjective (lucky),
which must go before the noun (boys). so, in order to be grammatical, this
type of phrase must have the sequence article + adjective + noun (and not
*noun+ article +adjective, for example).
1. Traditional Grammar
The terms article, adjective, and noun that we used to label
grammatical categories of the words in the phrase the lucky boys
come from traditional grammar, which has its origins in the
description of languages such as Latin and Greek. Since there were
well-established grammatical descriptions of these languages, it
seemed appropriate to adopt the existing categories from these
descriptions and apply them in the analysis of newer languages such
as English. After all, Latin and Greek were the languages of
scholarship, religion, philosophy and knowledge, so the grammar of
these languages was taken to be the model for other grammars. The
best-known terms from that tradition are those used in describing the
parts of speech.
2. The Parts Of Speech
The technical terms used to describe each part of speech are
illustrated in the following sentence and simple definitions of each
term are listed.

Nouns are words used to refer to people (boy), objects (backpack),

creatures (dog), places (school), qualities (roughness), phenomena
(earthquake) and abstract ideas (love) as if they were all things.
Articles are words (a, an, the) used with nouns to form noun
phrases classifying those things (You can have a banana or
an apple) or identifying them as already known (Ill take the
apple).
Adjectives are words used typically with nouns, to provide
more information about the things referred to (happy people,
(large object, a strange experience)
Verbs are words used to refer to various kinds of actions (go,
talk) and states (be, have) involving people and things in
events.
Adverbs are words used, typically with verbs, to provide more
information about actions, states and event (slowly,
yesterday). Some adverbs (really, very) are also used with
adjectives to modify information about things
Prepositions are word (at, in, on, near, with, without) used
with nouns in phrases providing informations about time,
place and other connections involving actions and things.
Pronouns are words (she, herself, they, it, you) used in place
of noun phrases, typically referring to people and things
already known.
Conjunctions are words (and, but, because, when) used to
make connections and indicate relations between events.
3. Agreement
In addition to the terms used for the parts of speech, traditional
grammatical analysis has also given us a number of other categories,
including number, person, tense, voice and gender. These
categories can be discussed in isolation, but their role in describing

language structure becomes clearer when we consider them in terms

of agreement.
4. Grammatical Gender
The type of biological distinction used in English is quite
different from the more common distinction found in languages that
use grammatical gender. Whereas natural gender is based on sex
(male and female), grammatical gender is based on the type of noun
(masculine and feminine) and is not tied to sex. In this latter sense,
nouns are classified according to their gender class and, typically,
articles and adjectives have different forms to agree with the gender
of the noun.
5. Traditional Analysis
The notion of appropriateness of analytic categories for a
particular language has not always been a consideration. In traditional
grammar books, tables such as the following were often presented for
English verbs, constructed by analogy with similar tables of forms in
Latin grammars. The forms for the Latin verb amare (to love) are
listed on the right.
6. Prescriptive Approach
Prescriptive approach is the approach to the study of language,
which holds that any provision regarding the absolute correct wrong
in the language and purpose of language analysis is to compile the
norms of language usage (Yule, 1985: 72). that approach embraced by
most experts are assigned grammatical norms make to use proper
grammar and correct. the prescriptive approach in English must be in
accordance with the Latin sentence structure.
7. Descriptive Approach
It may be that using a well-established grammatical description of
Latin is a useful guide for some European languages (e.g. Italian or
Spanish), is less useful for others (e.g. English), and may be
absolutely misleading if you are trying to describe some non-

European languages. Analysts collected samples of the language they

were interested in and attempted to describe the regular structures of
the language as it was used, not according to some view of how it
should be used. This is called the descriptive approach.
8. Structural Analysis
One type of descriptive approach is called structural analysis and
its main concern is to investigate the distribution of forms in a
language. The method involves the use of test-frames that can be
sentences with empty slots in them. We can now see that it is more
accurate to say that pronouns are used in place of noun phrases (not
just nouns). By developing a set of test-frames of this type and
discovering which forms fit the slots in the test-frames, we can
produce a description of (at least some) aspects of the sentence
structures of a language.
9. Immediate Constituent Analysis
An approach with the same descriptive aims is called immediate
constituent analysis. The technique employed in this approach is
designed to show how small constituents (or components) in
sentences go together to form larger constituents. One basic step is
determining how words go together to form phrases. In the following
sentence, we can identify eight constituents at the word level: Her
father brought a shotgun to the wedding.
10. Labeled and bracketed sentences
An alternative type of diagram is designed to show how the
constituents in sentence structure can be marked off by using labeled
brackets. The first step is to put brackets (one on each side) round
each constituent, and then more brackets round each combination of
constituents. For example:
Art (= article), N (= noun), NP (= noun phrase), V (= verb),
VP (= verb phrase) and S (= sentence).