SYNTAX

Syntax is the study of sentence structure as well as the structure of phrases that make a sentence. The sentence is considered to be the longest structural unit of which full grammatical analysis is possible even though there are sub-fields of linguistics that investigate beyond the sentence level rules of language (pragmatics and discourse analysis). Thus, the domain of syntax is confined to the analysis of the sentence and its smaller components, such as clauses and phrases. As we shall see later, sentences can consist of one or more clauses, clauses can consist of two or more phrases, phrases consist of one or more words, and finally, words consist of one or more morphemes. Syntax investigates both how sentences are formed and interpreted by speakers and hearers.

descriptive grammars consist of accounts for real-life language use. Descriptive grammar does not impose patterns of the so-called correct language rules. Unlike prescriptive grammar, descriptive grammar is not judgmental, it does not group the language produced by native speakers as correct or incorrect. In other words, it does not dictate that language should be used in a particular way. Descriptive grammar aims to explain the language exactly as it is spoken or written by native speakers. A linguist is necessarily descriptive, but language teachers are prescriptive since they must teach the varieties of the language that are spoken by well-educated speakers.

This type of normative grammar that imposes correct language use is known as prescriptive grammar and its function is to tell people what is good vs. bad language use. Most of the time these rules do not reflect the way in which language is actually used by native speakers and they fail to account for the real rules of the language.

American linguist Noam Chomsky, as well as the German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt,  noted, any language consists of an infinite number of sentences that can be created by speakers of that language. The number of vocabulary in a language is limited

Universal Grammar postulates that the language faculty in the human mind is biologically pre-programmed with the common properties and constraints of human languages. Human languages have a great deal in common, which enables us to translate ideas from one language to another. They also have differences. The Universal Grammar approach claims that human beings are inherently endowed with a universal set of principles and parameters which limit the possible structures in a particular language and which allows all languages to be similar in some respects.

Competence is the knowledge of a native speaker about the rules of his/her native language in an ideal community, under ideal circumstances. Competence includes the knowledge of both forming phrases and sentences as well as native speaker intuitions about the grammaticality or ungrammaticality of sentences. Native speaker intuitions are thus part of their competence.

performance, which includes the production of a speaker’s native language. Very often performance is an imperfect reflection of competence. For example, people can have slips of the tongue in everyday speech, they may have false starts; they may not complete their sentences because they may be tired or bored. All these are called performance errors. Thus, native speaker mistakes cannot be attributed to lack of knowledge of linguistic rules but to other performance factors we gave above, such as fatigue, boredom, etc.

A grammatical, or well-formed, sentence means a sentence which can possibly be produced spontaneously by a native speaker in the appropriate context. It is a convention to mark an ungrammatical sentence with an asterisk (*) in the linguistics literature.

Principles are those abstractions that do not vary across languages. No principle can be violated in any human language.

Structure-dependent means that every human language is systematic at every level, including the levels of phrase and sentence structure. We do not obtain phrases or sentences merely by putting words in a random order. Rather, there are some underlying rules that govern sentence structure. So, all sentences in any language are formed and understood based on rules. No sentence can be formed without any systematic underlying rules.

principles and parameters limit the possible structures in a particular language and allow all languages to be similar in some respects.

recursion. This means that it is possible for one sentence to contain other clause(s).

A clause is a grammatical unit that has a subject and a verb. For example, the simple sentence in (1) forms part of the complex sentence in (2), and the resulting sentence can form part of a still more complex sentence.

The embedding principle of human languages.

while Turkish is a verb-final language, English has Subject-Verb-Object order. While all English tensed clauses must have an overt subject, we can drop subjects in Turkish sentences. These types of possibilities constitute parameters.

The aim of linguistic research is to seek answers to questions such as:

a) What constitutes knowledge of language?

b) How is knowledge of language acquired?

c) How is this knowledge put into use?

aims at investigating this mental knowledge of the grammar of a native speaker, both grammaticality and ungrammaticality should be explained. The grammatical analysis must provide a set of well-formedness conditions and should distinguish them from ill-formed sentences.

The problem here is not a structural problem. Nevertheless, we tend to reject the sentence based on our world knowledge. We know that under normal circumstances (e.g. except for in novels, stories, etc.) fish cannot walk. We can say that the sentence is grammatical and yet it is not acceptable.

Since it is clear by our world knowledge that butterflies cannot run, this sentence is grammatical but not acceptable. 

Linguists achieve descriptive adequacy when they can accurately describe a syntactic rule and when their rule does not overgenerate, namely when the rule does not generate ungrammatical sentences. Thus, explicit rules posited by syntax must be able to reflect the native speaker’s mental model about producing those grammatical sentences. It should be able to tell that certain sentences are grammatical, while others are not, it should explain some sentences are ambiguous.