Syntax
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What is syntax? |
The word syntax means the arrangement of words and phrases to
create accurate sentences and it comes from the Greek syntaxis,
meaning to arrange together.
For example, if we take the words:
party
John
left
the
early
you will probably have little difficulty
constructing a well-formed sentence. Try it now and then
click here.
You almost certainly
produced:
John left the party
early
You could only do that because of your understanding of the rules of
English syntax. It is just conceivable that you may have
produced:
The party left John
early
but extremely unlikely.
You did not produce other combinations of the words such as:
*Left early John
party the
because such a combination would break the rules of English syntax.
(The '*' before the sentence is the conventional way of
signalling that an example is malformed, by the way.)
Now, there are five words in that sentence and there are,
mathematically, 120 ways that we can arrange five words. (If
we add one more word, the possible combinations grow to 720, adding
a seventh results 5040 possibilities and an eighth brings the total
up to 40,320 but of those only a very small proportion of
combinations are allowed by the rules of English syntax.)
Rules of syntax, therefore
- restrict the ways we can combine words to make sentences
- make it possible to create innumerable correct sentences by applying a finite number of rules again and again
To illustrate the second point, we can use exactly the same rules
to make:
Mary enjoyed the party greatly
I hated the cow quite a lot
That bungalow ate my sandwiches yesterday
and literally millions of other perfectly well-formed sentences,
some of which may even make sense.
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The relationship between word class and syntax |
Although there are technical terms for
these relationships, we'll stick to the ideas. If you really
want to know more, try
the guide to lexical relationships in the in-service training
section (new tab).
For the moment, this is all you need to know.
-
Word class relationships work
vertically in a sentence because we can replace like with like
and still keep the grammar acceptably correct. For
example, in:
I want my lunch
it is simple to see that we can replace all the words with other words in the same class and make a sentence like:
They broke her chair
and all we have done is replace a pronoun with a pronoun, a verb with a verb, a possessive determiner with another one and a noun with a noun.
The words have changed but the word classes have not so the grammar works just as well. We could also have:
She exploded our potato
and while that carries almost no meaning, it is still grammatical. -
Syntax works horizontally along a sentence so syntactical
relationships are between words of different
classes. It is clear, for example, that if we begin with:
It was a beautiful ...
we are very likely to follow the last word with a noun such as day, party, garden, thought, story or whatever but we are not going to follow it with a verb, preposition, adverb, pronoun or other word class so clauses like:
*It was a beautiful explode
*It was a beautiful at
*It was a beautiful extremely
*It was a beautiful them
etc. are simply not possible grammatically.
We could, of course, follow beautiful with another adjective so we allow
It was a beautiful, old sports ...
but, sooner or later, we know that we have to use a noun to make the syntax work (car perhaps?).
Here's a diagram of this for people who like them:
To explain a little, what this shows is that we can replace words with others in the same class (the red vertical arrow on the left) but syntax works differently (the horizontal, green arrow at the top).
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The elements of a sentence |
To understand how to make a well-formed sentence in any language, it is necessary to know what functions the various bits and pieces (words and phrases) are performing.
In our example sentence,
John left the
party early
we have four separate ideas answering four questions:
- Who did something?
- What did the person do?
- What did the person do it to?
- When, where or how did the person do it?
In our sentence, this works like this:
| John | left | the party | early |
| Who? | Did what? | To what? | When etc.? |
| the subject | the verb | the object | the adverbial |
Because you have followed the guide to word- and phrase-class, you can also add a row to the table to show what each part is doing in terms of the grammar, so we can have:
| John | left | the party | early |
| Who? | Did what? | To what? | When etc.? |
| the subject | the verb | the object | the adverbial |
| noun | verb | determiner + noun | adverb |
The important thing about rules of syntax, as we noted above is that they allow us
to construct and understand an almost infinite number of perfectly
well-formed sentences by applying the same rules of syntax again and
again to the elements of the sentence so we can have, for example:
The car ran the man over
The fire caused the damage immediately
The money helped me with my studies
She took the train to work
They opened the box carefully
She booked the hotel on the internet
and so on.
The simple rule we have followed here of ordering the items like
this:
subject + verb +
object + adverbial
will not, of course, work for all sentences in English and there are
many other rules which we can apply to make different forms of
sentences such as:
In the morning, breakfast was delivered to my room by the
maid
which follows different but still transparent rules of syntax.
The same rules will enable us to make:
At four o'clock, the house was demolished by
the storm
Unfortunately, the window was broken by the children
and so on.
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Notes on adverbials |
The terms adverbial did not get a mention in the guide to word
and phrase class in this section of the site because there is no
such word class as adverbial.
An adverbial is any word, phrase or clause that tells us something
more about the verb. Adverbs are always adverbial
but not
all adverbials are adverbs.
Here are some examples of adverbials in English (in black).
| Examples | Comment |
| Mary arrived late | Here, the adverbial is a simple,
one-word adverb telling us when she arrived
(late). Adverbs like this most often follow
the verb so we could also have: John went home They ran quickly and so on. |
| We went to the cinema | This adverbial is not an adverb.
It is a prepositional phase telling us where
we went and they are very common ways of adding information
about times and places to verbs so we could also have: They arrived in the morning The house burnt to the ground and so on. |
| She painted the house very poorly | This adverbial is an adverb phrase
(very + poorly) which tells us how
the painting was done. We can also use other types of
words and phrases to convey the same kind of information so
we could have: We spoke to them in German She accepted the honour with great pleasure and so on. |
| We sold the car to get some money | This adverbial is a clause (because
it contains a verb) and tells us why we
sold the car so we could also have: They came to collect their folders She opened the box to see what he'd sent and so on. We can also use some conjunctions to express the same meaning so we could have: They explained it again because I hadn't understood Mary fixed the door so that the cat couldn't get out |
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Click here to take a short test to see if you can identify what adverbials are and are doing. |
Adverbials are mobile and can appear:
- at the beginning of a sentence, before the subject, as in, e.g.:
- In the morning it rained
- before the verb, as in, e.g.:
- She very frequently complained
- after the verb, as in, e.g.:
- She came quickly into the kitchen
- after the object, at the end of the sentence, as in, e.g.:
- She ate two pieces of toast at breakfast
The rules for where adverbials are placed are not simple.
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The ordering of elements |
There are a few syntactical rules in English which are very
important and often different from the rules in other languages.
Do not assume that all languages are the same. Here are the
rules:
- In positive and negative sentences, the
usual ordering is:
Subject + Verb + Object
so we have, for example:
John explained the problem
not
*John the problem explained
or
*The problem John explained
both of which are possible in other languages.
(Japanese, Korean and Turkish are usually, for example, Subject + Object + Verb and some languages such as a few dialects of Korean are Object + Subject + Verb and German frequently orders the items that way.) - The ordering in English is:
Determiner + Noun (or noun phrase)
so we have, for example:
three glasses
and
some salt
not
*glasses three
or
*salt some
(Many South-East Asian languages follow the opposite ordering.) - The ordering in English is:
Adjective + Noun
so we have, for example:
the horrible weather
not
*the weather horrible
(as, for example, in French [le temps horrible] or Spanish [el clima horrible]) - English has prepositions so the ordering is:
Preposition + noun (or noun phrase)
so we have, for example:
over the road
not
*the road over
(Many languages, such as Turkish and Japanese have postpositions and the reverse ordering of the elements.) - In English, we can put the possessive before the noun so we
can have, e.g.:
That is my book
not
*That is book my
And we can also put them the other way round with the preposition of as in, e.g.:
The policy of the government
instead of
The government's policy
In English, therefore, we have two possible orderings:
Possessive + noun (or noun phrase)
or
Noun (or noun phrase) + of + noun (or noun phrase)
Most languages choose one way or the other and this is a source of confusion for many learners.
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Verbs, subjects and objects (and adverbials) |
It was explained above that the normal ordering in English is
Subject + Verb + Object but that's not quite the end of the story.
There are different sorts of verbs which control the ordering of the
elements of a sentence. This is a complex area so this is a
simplification.
- Some verbs do not take an object at all so the ordering is
usually:
Subject + Verb (+ adverbial)
like this:
John arrived
John arrived at the hotel
Mary danced
Mary danced beautifully - Some verbs take a single object so the ordering is usually:
Subject + Verb + Object (+ adverbial)
like this:
John explained the problem clearly
Mary smoked a cigar outside - Some verbs can take two objects so the ordering is usually
Subject + Verb + Indirect Object + Direct Object (+ adverbial)
like this:
She told the children a story last night
I gave the man the money reluctantly
In all of the above, we have put (+ adverbial) in brackets because they are usually optional parts of the sentence or clause and can be multiplied virtually indefinitely.
Some verbs can appear with no object as in, e.g.:
Do you smoke
or with an object as in:
Does he smoke a pipe?
Other verbs can take one or two objects as in, e.g.:
He told the truth
with one object, or
He told me the truth
with two objects.
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Click here to take a short test to see if you can identify what the main parts of English syntax are. |
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Implications for teaching |
Syntax is a complicated matter and you need always to be aware of the fact that it varies across languages. It is very important, therefore that you:
- Present realistic models.
It is always possible to find exceptions to the syntactical rules in English such as:
With this ring, I thee wed
Her I could marry
Eat this I will not
and so on.
However, those are all examples of people deliberately altering the usual word ordering for effect and are not good models for your learners. - Are aware of differences between languages.
There are guides on this site, linked below, to help you with how syntax works in other languages.
- Are aware of the syntax of your models.
Many lessons will include some kind of model sentence which demonstrates the structure you are targeting. Look at it carefully and make sure that you are asking your learners to produce sentences which are similar in structure.
For example, if your model sentence is something like:
The police officers saved the man's life
do not expect your learners to produce
The house was saved by the fire officers
because the syntax is very different. - Present new items in context.
You may successfully tell a student, for example, that hide is similar in meaning to conceal (and it is) but if you don't also consider the syntax, you may find learners are confused and will produce, e.g.:
She concealed behind the curtain
because that verb always takes an object but hide can appear with and without an object.
This has been a short and very severely edited guide to a complex set
of topics and ideas. It is enough to get you started but you
will need to know more very soon.
From here, you can look at
some other aspects of syntax. Use
this menu:
| word order | subjects and objects | sentence grammar | syntax (in-service guide) |
Click here to go to the next section on conjunction