Chapter 6, Syntax

Session 1: Introduction to the Study of Syntax

CHAPTER GOALS
• Explain why syntactic awareness is important for reading and
writing
• Reflect on humans’ unconscious knowledge of syntax,
including rules and patterns for generating word sequences,
and contrast this with formal (prescriptive) grammar
• Identify and describe a basic sentence as containing a noun or
noun phrase (subject) and verb or verb phrase (predicate)
• Define traditional parts of speech in relation to the functions
of words in sentences or grammatical classes
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CHAPTER GOALS (continued)
• Describe and distinguish types of phrases, clauses, and simple, compound,
and complex sentences
• Understand how words, phrases, and clauses combine to serve slot-filling
roles in sentence structure
• Identify questions, exclamations, imperatives, and various statement forms
as transformations of basic sentence structure
• Review strategies for teaching syntactic awareness for reading and writing

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Chapter 6, Session 1
Introduction to the Study of Syntax

Prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar; phrase structure and argument structure

in written text; nature of academic language; evidence of mental grammar.
Reading: STP Chapter 6
Workbook: Pretest, Exercises 70–74

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Key Ideas
• Academic and conversational language differ in many respects, including
syntax and sentence construction.
• Proficiency with academic language, including syntax, correlates with
reading comprehension, and writing makes demands on a student’s
knowledge of syntax.
• Prescriptive grammar is distinct from descriptive grammar.
• Syntax and meaning can be independent: Sentence frames exist apart from
the meanings of the words within them.

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Why Is Syntactic Awareness Important?
To comprehend written text we must mentally
• Interpret the meanings of individual words as they are used in sentence
context
• elicit, illicit; passed, past; effect, affect; dependents, dependence
• Group words together into phrases and phrases into clauses
• “Slow children, playing” or “Slow, children playing”
• Interpret compound and complex sentence structures
• Monitor whether the words we have read make sense
• Associate or integrate links across sentences

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How Do We Demonstrate Awareness of
Syntax?
We can:
• Recognize, interpret, and generate word combinations that conform to
underlying rules of sentence structure.
• Formulate and produce novel sentences.
• Consciously order words and manipulate sentence parts to address a given
audience and clarify meaning.
• Recognize that there are options for expressing ideas and the relationships
among them.

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Academic Language Differs from
Conversational Language
• Formality—a different “register”
• Density—more ideas per sentence
• Absence of body language, situational context, or speaker’s voice to help
interpretation
• Use of constructions such as
• Double negatives
• Passive voice
• Separation of main noun and main verb
• Ellipsis (omission of words that are assumed)

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Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammar
• Prescriptive grammar and usage are what your English teacher tried to
teach you.
• Editorial standards for publishing
• Forms that are found in most published books and print media
• Conventions of use in the dominant language community—associated with higher-
status jobs and more advanced educational attainment
• Descriptive grammar is the study of or description of how people actually
speak.
• No judgments of “correct” or incorrect
• Usually the task of professional linguists—to document language use

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Permissible Grammatical Usage or
Not?
• I’m going to lay down and take a nap.
• Me and my cousin went to the movies.
• There’s many reasons why we bought that car.
• He did bad on the test.
• Now ain’t that a shame.

How do the circumstances of language use affect your judgments?

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What Is a Mental Grammar?
• The underlying architecture of a combinatorial system learned by speakers of
a language
• Determines how words and phrases can be ordered in a language
• A linguistic skeleton that specifies “slots” where certain types of words must
go
• Includes phrase structure trees and syntactic categories
• Is independent of the words put into those frames

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Independence of Meaning and
Grammatical Structure
• Sentences may be poorly formed and still convey meaning
• Baby no cry
• Not hiking, seen wolfs
• Dinner no chopsticks, forks ask for
• Sentences may be well formed, according to the rules of mental grammar,
and convey little to no meaning
• Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (coined by N. Chomsky)
• George scrabbled the monopoly of the metaphors

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Word Order, Ambiguity, and Underlying
Structure
“Flying hang gliders can be dangerous” is ambiguous because it can have two
meanings:
1) Flying [the action] can be dangerous.
2) Hang gliders [the object] can be dangerous.
• The words are the “surface structure” of the sentence.
• The “deep structure” is the underlying sentence framework.
• The slots in the sentence’s skeleton or framework will be filled by words that
tell a story: Who did what to whom? How? When? Why? Where?

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Summary: Evidence for Existence of
Syntactic Structures within Language
Systems
• Sentences can be grammatically correct but make no sense.
• Sentences can be grammatically incorrect but be meaningful.
• The order of words expresses the relationships among ideas (who or what did
what to whom or what).
• Sentences can be ambiguous.
• Sentences with different word sequences (surface structures) can mean the
same thing.
• An infinite number of sentences is possible because syntax is a combinatorial
system—a system for grouping elements in endlessly novel ways.

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