What is syntax.docVIP

What is syntax Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies how the words are combined to form sentences and how the sentences are grouped by rules of their structures. 4.2 Categories Categories refer to a group of linguistics items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language. Such as sentences noun phrases or verbs. 4.2.1 Word-level categories 1. Words can be grouped together into a relatively small number of classes called syntactic categories. Syntactic categories reflect factors including type of meaning, affixes, structures these words take. The most central categories to the syntactic study are the word-level categories 2. There are eight word-level categories in traditional grammar and three non-traditional word-level categories, namely Determiners, Degree words Qualifiers 翻译：限定词、程度词、修饰词 3. Two kinds of categories: A. Major lexical categories: The categories, which play important roles in forming sentences. They are always regarded as the heads of the phrases including nouns verbs adjectives propositions etc. Miner lexical categories: The categories, which play less important roles in sentence formation including qualifier determiner or degree words. 4. Categories are not clearly cut since some words belong to more than one category. Three criteria to determine the lexical categories: meaning, reflection, and distribution. Distribution is more reliable 5. Lexical categories can not be told only by their meanings. Reasons: a.. Some abstract nouns do no reveal their entities such as dilemma, friendship etc. b. Some words which tend to be nouns can be used as verbs, such as love, hate c. Some nouns with the similar meaning belong to different categories such as be aware of and know about 4.2.2 Phrase categories and their structures 1. Syntactic units built around a certain word is called phrase. The category of a phrase is determined by the wo