FUNDAMENTAL OF ENGLISH SYNTAX

PAPER

Proposed to fulfil the assignment of Second Language Acquisition
Recomenned by Mrs. Kristanti Ayu Anita , M. Pd




Arranged by:
IMAM SYAFII
HERLINA FAIZAH
HELLIYATUL MUKARROMAH
HODAIFAH
JEFTIYATUR ROHANIYAH





















STATE ISLAMIC COLLEGE OF PAMEKASAN
ENGLISH TEACHING DEPARTMENT
OCTOBER 2009

Fundamental of English Syntax

A. BACKGROUND
This is a brief introduction to syntax, the study of the structure of sentences. It is designed for use as part of an introductory course in general English linguistics, and as such must be selective. The literature references give more detailed introductions to syntax, which students must consult if they are to understand the literature in journals or do syntactic research themselves.
Linguistics, like all other sciences, is constantly making new discoveries and many issues in linguistics are subject to debate. Doing justice to all the important recent discoveries and to all the approaches which have been suggested for the phenomena we discuss is impossible here. The text concentrates on basic concepts which will give students an idea of what syntax is about, but at the same time aspires to a broad introduction to syntactic phenomena and argumentation which will be of use whether or not the readers pursue further study in syntax.

B. ENGLISH SYNTAX
1. Introductory Concepts
1.1. Syntactic categories
It is assumed that you have some familiarity with what in traditional grammar were called the parts of speech. Such notions are now covered by the term categories or syntactic categories.
(1)
Category Abbreviation Example
a. noun N John, London, computer, city, stupidity, event
b. verb V hear, think, kill, shorten, eavesdrop, exist
c. adjective A good, obscene, demented, lovely, schoolmasterly
d. preposition P by, in, with, from, to, at, inside, despite
e. adverb Adv slowly, often, now, mostly
f. determiner D (or Det) a, the, this, those
It is worthwhile learning the abbreviations for the categories, as they are used in other works.
Let us briefly examine some of the criteria which are used in determining the category a word belongs to. We will not try to give a full list of completely failsafe criteria here; we will simply indicate the types of criteria which are considered more reliable by syntacticians. One less reliable type of criterion for categories which you may already have encountered is semantic, i.e. based on meaning. Thus, you may have been told in school that a noun denotes a person, place or thing, that a verb denotes an activity or state and that an adjective denotes a property. Unfortunately, such semantic generalizations are tendencies, not absolute rules. Thus, there are nouns which denote activities (the hammering), events (recital), states (drunkenness) and properties (silliness).
More reliable evidence for determining the category of a word come from morphological and distributional criteria. Examples of morphological criteria would be that nouns, but no other category, can take a plural affix (tables, intervals, oxen) and that most verbs change their morphological form according to the requirements of tense and agreement (I sing, she sings, I sang; I talk, she talks, I talked). If you can add -ly to a word to form an adverb, you know that word is an adjective (slow>slowly). Examples of distributional criteria for various categories are given below. In each case, assume that the gap in the sentence is to be filled by a single word.
(2)
a. They have no []N
b. the []A []N
c. She did so []Adv
d. very []A/Adv
e. They can []V
1.2. Constituent structure
Identifying the syntactic category of each word in a sentence is only the beginning of syntactic analysis. Consider the simple sentence below:
(3)
That man likes that woman
In analyzing sentence (3), we might propose the following rule:

(4)
S →D+N+V+D+N
(Translation: A sentence can consist of the sequence determiner + noun + verb + determiner + noun.)
It is easy to show that a rule like (4) is a completely uninformative way of describing a sentence. Suppose we want to give more information about the man spoken of in (3) and/or to say that he likes someone or something other than that woman. We could then replace that man and that women with different, more complex expressions. A small selection of the infinite number of possible replacements is given in (5) and (6).
(5)
a. that old man
b. that old man with the bottle of beer
c. that extremely old and decrepit man with a nearly empty bottle of cheap beer
d. that man over there near the window
e. that extremely old and decrepit man over there with a nearly empty bottle of cheap beer
(6)
a. heavy metal music from the Seventies
b. people with a flair for the unusual
c. paintings by certain fairly weird and decadent artists
d. the lady over there beside the fireplace
e. his collection of photographs of Victorian guesthouses in Tasmania
The possibility of replacing that man in (3) with any expression in (5) and that woman in (3) with any expression in (6) gives us twenty-five sentences. If we wish to be able to describe what happens using rules like that in (4), we would require twenty-five different rules. Once we start adding further material to the sentence (say, very much just before likes and/or obviously at the beginning of the sentence), the number of rules of the type in (4) begins to multiply. We rapidly come to the conclusion that the number of rules of the type in (4) required to describe possible English sentences would be infinite. There is no way a child could learn such rules. Also, such rules are purely descriptive, by which is meant that they just state empirical facts without giving any explanation for them. Also, they do not tell us anything about how the words relate to each other.
A way out of this impasse emerges when we realize that what has hitherto been lacking in our analysis of sentences has been the idea that words can combine with other words to form larger groups of words which belong together. In technical parlance, such groups of words are called constituents. Constituents combine with other constituents to form yet larger constituents, until we eventually have the largest type of constituent studied in syntax, the sentence. The expressions listed in (5) and (6) were examples of constituents called 'noun phrases' (NPs), expressions which include a noun and some additional material giving additional information about it. NPs can typically be replaced by pronouns: each NP in (5) and (6) can be replaced by he, her, it, them etc. as appropriate. We will give a better definition of NPs and other types of constituents later. Our purpose now is merely to show how establishing constituent structure greatly helps us in analyzing sentences. Consider (7), which will be rejected later and should not be memorized, but is far better than (4):
(7)
S → NP V NP (Translation: A sentence can consist of the sequence NP+V+NP.)
Even if we are only interested in describing the twenty-five possible sentences consisting of a NP from (5), a verb and a NP from (6), the benefits of recognizing constituent structure should now be apparent. If we use rules of the type in (4), we would require twenty-five rules to describe these sentences, whereas (7) describes all twenty-five sentences with just one rule. It should be emphasized again that the rule in (7) is being used only as a way of showing the need for constituent structure. We will later show how this rule can be improved upon. As another, more interesting argument for the need for constituent structure, consider the following sentences containing the possessive s morpheme:
(8)
a. [That lady]'s husband left.
b. [That lady over there]'s husband left. (=the husband of that lady over there...)
c. [That lady near the door]'s husband left. (=the husband of that lady near the door...)
d. [That lady you talked to]'s husband left. (=the husband of that lady you talked to...)
e. [That lady you saw]'s husband left. (=the husband of that lady you saw...)
Notice that we cannot describe the behavior of the possessive 's in terms of the category of the words it attaches to: 's can appear immediately to the right of a word of any category.
Notice also that 's does not necessarily say that the word it appears to the right of is the possessor. (For instance, the door in (8) (c) probably does not have a husband.) Rather, the correct generalization is that possessive 's attaches to a particular type of constituent (marked by square brackets in (8)), namely a NP. Without knowing what a NP is, there is simply no way to describe the behaviour of possessive 's. Thus, we cannot describe sentence structure without recourse to constituents.
1.3. Tests for constituents
In all sciences, linguistics included, one should be able to assess the truth or falsehood of a claim by means of objective tests. We now introduce some tests for establishing whether a string (i.e. group of words) is a constituent or not.
a) Pro-form test.
Pro-forms are expressions like she, them, somewhere, do so, there which have the function of representing a constituent which has already been mentioned, so that one need not go to the effort of pronouncing/writing the constituent twice. The best-known type of pro-form is a so-called pronoun, which replaces a NP, e.g. she/him/they. If you can replace a string with a pro-form, the string is a constituent. (9) illustrates the use of the pro-form test in finding constituents in (9)(a).
(9)
a. The lady running the group handed in her resignation on Friday at noon.
b. She handed in her resignation on Friday at noon. [Thus, The lady running the group is a constituent]
c. The lady running it handed in her resignation on Friday at noon. [Thus, the group is a constituent]
d. The lady running the group did so on Friday at noon. [Thus, handed in her resignation is a constituent]
e. The lady running the group handed in her resignation then. [Thus, on Friday at noon is a constituent]
b) Question test.
If you can convert a sentence into a question using a wh-expression (e.g. where/how/when/why/what/who(m), and phrases like with whom?, at what time?, in whose house?), the string that the wh-expression replaces is a constituent. (Wh-expressions are pro-forms.) The answer to the question is also a constituent. (10) illustrates this with reference to (9)(a). In each case, A and B refer to different speakers. B's answer is a constituent.
(10)
a. A: What did the lady running the group hand in on Friday at noon?
B: Her resignation.
b. A: Who handed in her resignation on Friday at noon?
B: The lady running the group
c. A: When did the lady running the group hand in her resignation?
B: On Friday at noon
c) Movement test.
If a string can be moved to some other position in the sentence, you know
it is very likely to be a constituent. The following examples apply this test to identify constituents in the respective (a) sentences.
(11)
a. Egbert was reading a thick book about formal logic on the balcony on Sunday.
b. On Sunday, Egbert was reading a thick book about formal logic on the balcony.
c. On the balcony, Egbert was reading a thick book about formal logic on Sunday.
d. Egbert was reading on the balcony on Sunday a thick book about formal logic.
(12)
a. Rover ran out of the house.
b. Out of the house Rover ran.
(13)
a. Ann is not a fan of mindless techno music.
b. A fan of mindless techno music, Ann is not.
(14)
a. Gertrude wasn't interested in art.
b. Interested in art, Gertrude wasn't.
(15)
a. Hortense didn't win the race.
b. Win the race, Hortense didn't.
d) Coordination test.
Coordination is the operation of joining two words or phrases together using conjunctions, e.g. and and or. Strings joined by conjunctions must each be a constituent. (They must be constituents of the same type, a fact which will be important to us later.) Suppose you are trying to test whether the underlined strings in (16)(a) and (17)(a) are constituents. Try to find another expression which you can coordinate with the underlined string. You can be confident that the string is a constituent if you can place the other expression with which it is coordinated either before or after it without any difference in meaning, as in (16)(b,c) and (17)(b,c).
(16)
a. I went to the post office to post a letter.
b. I went to the post office to post a letter and did the shopping.
c. I did the shopping and went to the post office to post a letter.
(17)
a. She spoke to a small number of the students interested in the subject.
b. She spoke to a small number of the students interested in the subject and the staff.
c. She spoke to the staff and a small number of the students interested in the subject.



1.4. Phrasal categories and the notion of 'head'
Just like words, constituents larger than words have a category. We distinguish word-level categories (categories which are at the same level as a word, i.e. N, V, A, P, etc.) and phrasal categories or simply phrases (constituents larger than a word). Examples of the latter which were already mentioned are NP and S. There are a number of other types of phrases which you need to know about. The first thing to note is that each word-level category has a corresponding phrasal category, which contains the word-level category itself and any material which -in a manner to be made more precise later- adds additional information to it or is dependent on it. In (24)-(28) are examples of the phrasal categories we will be concentrating on in this text. Do not worry if you do not yet understand why the expressions in (24)-(28) are seen as instances of the respective categories. This set of problems is taken up shortly.
(18)
Noun Phrase (NP)
a. the woman; a (big) tree; (this) coffee, (our) existence
b. a (renowned) expert (on indigenous Australian music) (from Brisbane)
c. a (Russian) pianist (of exceptional talent) (who had world-wide critical acclaim)
d. the (most important) representatives (of workers' interests) (at the conference)
e. a documentary (by a French journalist) (about Spain)
(19)
Verb Phrase (VP)
a. (suddenly) die (of cancer) (at a young age)
b. (blindly) rely on the advice of a counselor
c. (often) called him a maladjusted sociopath
d. give Basil the book
e. read (a book)
(20)
Adjective Phrase (AP)
a. (very) angry (at the rest of the human race)
b. (completely and utterly) disappointed (at the ineptitude of German Telecom)
c. interested (in the history of Postmodernist theatre) (to some extent)
d. dull (to the extreme) e. (soul-destroyingly) boring f. devoid of content
(21)
Prepositional Phrase (PP)
a. (right) near the fireplace
b. towards the entrance to the building
c. (wholly) inside (the enclosure)
d. out (of the house)
e. despite the failed attempt of the paramilitary at blowing up the Institute of Syntax
(22)
Adverb Phrase (AdvP)
a. (very) slowly
b. (extremely) well
c. (completely) independently of the approval of his superiors
The underlined elements in the phrases above are the elements around which the respective phrases are built. They are said to be the heads of the respective phrases. (Alternative ways of saying this are, taking NP as an example, that N heads or projects NP, or that NP is a projection of N or is headed by N.) THE HEAD OF A PHRASE IS THE ELEMENT WHICH DETERMINES THE PROPERTIES OF THE WHOLE PHRASE. All elements in a phrase other than the head are dependent on the head, in that they either give additional information about the head, or are included in the phrase because the head requires that they be there. The head is obligatory, in the sense that if you leave out the head of a phrase, the rest of the phrase must be left out too. You can confirm this by forming a sentence containing any of the phrases in (24)-(28), but omitting the head of that phrase. The resulting sentence will almost certainly not be a possible English sentence.
Note that the notion of 'head' also applies to word structure. Inside words, the head is the element which determines the properties of the whole word. For instance, we say that eat is the head of overeat because the whole word has the same category as eat (i.e. it is a verb) and is inflected in the same way as eat (cf. ate/eaten and overate/overeaten).
A difference between morphological and syntactic heads is that, in English, the head of a word is usually the right-hand element, while the head of a phrase is often not the right-hand element.

C. CONCLUSION
Learning English syntax is sometimes complicated. Therefore it will take long time for English learners who want to understand deeply about English syntax. It takes more reference and it also emphasized the learning in reading even comprehending the matters is the process of understanding English syntax
This paper is not enough to be reference to understand about English syntax but it will be very useful for you who begin to learn English syntax. Based on this paper, there some brief explanation about:
a) Syntactic categories
b) Constituent structure
c) Tests for constituent
d) Phrasal categories and the notion of “head”
Those four concepts have been explained clearly by the writers. The writers do hope this paper will be very significant material for the writers themselves especially for the learners who are in the process of learning English syntax.

D. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nasar, Raja T, The Essential of Linguistic Science, Longman House, Harlow, London, England, 1984.
Lyons, John, Language a Linguistic and Introduction, Cambridge University, New York, 1984.
Yule, George, The Study of Language an Introduction, Britanian: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Jannedy, Stefanie cs, Language Files, Columbus: Ohio State University, 1994.