In linguistics, syntax (from Ancient Greek συν- syn-, "together", and τάξις táxis, "arrangement") is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields Theoretical linguistics is the branch of Linguistics that is most concerned with developing models of linguistic knowledge Phonetics (from the Greek φωνή ( phonê) "sound" or "voice" is the study of the physical sounds of human speech Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, lexis (in Greek λέξις = word describes the storage of language in our mental Lexicon as prefabricated patterns ( Lexical units Semantics is the study of meaning in communication The word derives from Greek σημαντικός ( semantikos) "significant" from Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistic Semantics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky 1995 Statistical Semantics is the study of "how the statistical patterns of human word usage can be used to figure out what people mean at least to a level sufficient for information access" Logical positivism asserts that structural semantics is the study of relationships between the meanings of terms within a sentence and how meaning can be composed from smaller elements Prototype Theory is a mode of graded Categorization in Cognitive science, where some members of a category are more central than others Pragmatics is the study of the ability of Natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies investigates and offers solutions to language-related real life problems One hotly debated issue is whether the biological contribution includes capacities specific to language acquisition often referred to as Universal grammar. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable Humans to acquire use Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of Society, including cultural norms expectations and context on the way Language is used Linguistic anthropology is that branch of Anthropology that brings linguistic methods to bear on anthropological problems linking the analysis of Semiotic Generative linguistics is a school of thought within Linguistics that makes use of the concept of a Generative grammar. In Linguistics and Cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL refers to the school of linguistics that understands language creation learning and usage Computational linguistics is an Interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of Natural language from a computational Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how Language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past by a group of people in a speech community Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change Comparative linguistics (originally comparative Philology) is a branch of Historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to Etymology is the study of the History of Words &mdash when they entered a language from what source and how their form and meaning have changed over time Stylistics is the study of varieties of Language whose properties position that language in context. In Linguistics, prescription can refer both to the codification and the enforcement of rules governing how a language is to be used Corpus linguistics is the Study of language as expressed in Samples ( corpora) or "real world" text See also History of grammar Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of Language. A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies Linguistics. This article discusses currently unsolved problems in Linguistics. Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage in the development of the Hellenic language family spanning the Archaic (c In the Philosophy of language, a natural language (or ordinary language) is a Language that is spoken or written in phonemic-alphabetic or phonemically-related In addition to referring to the discipline, the term syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Irish Syntax is rather different from that of most Indo-European languages, notably because of its VSO word order Modern research in syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how Language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past by a group of people in a speech community Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages. Universal grammar is a theory of Linguistics postulating principles of Grammar shared by all languages thought to be innate to humans ( linguistic nativism The term syntax is also sometimes used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as logic, artificial formal languages, and computer programming languages. Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and Inference.

Early history

Works on grammar were being written long before modern syntax came about; the Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini is often cited as an example of a pre-modern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory. Pāṇini ( IAST: Pāṇini Dēvanāgarī: sa पाणिनि a Patronymic meaning "descendant of {{IAST|Paṇi}} " was an ancient ^[1] In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax. Dionysius Thrax ( (170 BC‑90 BC was a Hellenistic Grammarian who lived and is thought by some to have worked in Alexandria and later at Rhodes

For centuries, work in syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. Antoine Arnauld, ( February 6, 1612 - August 6, 1694) &mdash le Grand as contemporaries called him to distinguish him from his This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single, most natural way to express a thought. That way, coincidentally, was exactly the way it was expressed in French.

However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics, linguists began to realize the sheer diversity of human language, and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language change It became apparent that there was no such thing as a most natural way to express a thought, and therefore logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language.

The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic (indeed, large parts of the Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from the Grammaire générale^[2]). Port-Royal Logic, or Logique de Port-Royal, is the common name of La logique ou l'art de penser, an important textbook on logic first published anonymously Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "Subject – Copula – Predicate". Initially, this view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp. Franz Bopp ( September 14, 1791 – October 23, 1867) was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on

The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics is concerned. For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Graffi (2001).

Modern theories

There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. Many linguists (e. g. Noam Chomsky) see syntax as a branch of biology, since they conceive of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in the human mind. Avram Noam Chomsky (noʊm ˈtʃɑmski born December 7 1928 is an American linguist, Philosopher, cognitive scientist, Political MIND ( Moving In New Directions) (est 1975 is an alternative education high school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Others (e. g. Gerald Gazdar) take a more Platonistic view, since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system. Gerald Gazdar (born February 24, 1950) is a linguist and computer scientist The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of Philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions foundations and implications of Mathematics. In formal logic, a formal system (also called a logical system, a logistic system, or simply a logic Formal systems in mathematics consist ^[3] Yet others (e. g. Joseph Greenberg) consider grammar a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28 1915 – May 7 2001 was a prominent and controversial linguist and Africanist anthropologist known for his work in both typology Some of the major approaches to the discipline are listed below.

Generative grammar

Main article: Generative grammar

The hypothesis of generative grammar is that language is a structure of the human mind. In Theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of Syntax. In Theoretical linguistics, generative grammar refers to a particular approach to the study of Syntax. The goal of generative grammar is to make a complete model of this inner language (known as i-language). In Linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar ( TGG) is a Generative grammar, especially of a Natural This model could be used to describe all human language and to predict the grammaticality of any given utterance (that is, to predict whether the utterance would sound correct to native speakers of the language). In Theoretical linguistics, grammaticality is the quality of a linguistic Utterance of being grammatically well-formed. This approach to language was pioneered by Noam Chomsky. Avram Noam Chomsky (noʊm ˈtʃɑmski born December 7 1928 is an American linguist, Philosopher, cognitive scientist, Political Most generative theories (although not all of them) assume that syntax is based upon the constituent structure of sentences. Generative grammars are among the theories that focus primarily on the form of a sentence, rather than its communicative function.

Among the many generative theories of linguistics are:

• Transformational Grammar (TG) (now largely out of date)
• Government and binding theory (GB) (common in the late 1970s and 1980s)
• Minimalism (MP) (the most recent Chomskyan version of generative grammar)

Other theories that find their origin in the generative paradigm are:

• Generative semantics (now largely out of date)
• Relational grammar (RG) (now largely out of date)
• Arc Pair grammar
• Generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG; now largely out of date)
• Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG)
• Lexical-functional grammar (LFG)

Categorial grammar

Categorial grammar is an approach that attributes the syntactic structure not to rules of grammar, but to the properties of the syntactic categories themselves. In Linguistics, a transformational grammar, or transformational-generative grammar ( TGG) is a Generative grammar, especially of a Natural Government and binding is a theory of Syntax in the tradition of Transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s Minimalism in the sense described here is not related to Minimalism, the artistic and cultural movement Generative semantics is (or perhaps was a research program within Linguistics, initiated by the work of various early students of Noam Chomsky: John R In Linguistics, Relational Grammar (RG is a Syntactic theory which argues that Grammatical relations provide the ideal means to state transformational In linguistics Arc Pair grammar is a Syntactic theory developed by Paul Postal and David E Generalised phrase structure grammar (GPSG is a framework for describing the Syntax and Semantics of natural languages Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG is a highly lexicalized non-derivational Generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag Lexical functional grammar (LFG is a Grammar framework in Theoretical linguistics, a variety of Generative grammar. Categorial grammar is a term used for a family of formalisms in Natural language Syntax motivated by the principle of Compositionality and organized according A syntactic category is either a phrasal category, such as Noun phrase or Verb phrase, which can be decomposed into smaller syntactic For example, rather than asserting that sentences are constructed by a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP) (e. g. the phrase structure rule S → NP VP), in categorial grammar, such principles are embedded in the category of the head word itself. Phrase-structure rules are a way to describe a given language's Syntax. In linguistics the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the Phrase of which it is a member or analogously the stem that determines the So the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a functor which requires an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. In Grammar, an intransitive Verb does not take an object. In more technical terms an intransitive verb has only one argument (its subject In Category theory, a branch of Mathematics, a functor is a special type of mapping between categories This complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. NP\S is read as " a category that searches to the left (indicated by \) for a NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)". The category of transitive verb is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. In Syntax, a transitive verb is a Verb that requires both a subject and one or more objects Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs This is notated as (NP/(NP\S)) which means "a category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object), and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence).

Tree-adjoining grammar is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the categories. Tree-adjoining grammar (TAG is a grammar formalism defined by Aravind Joshi. A tree structure is a way of representing the hierarchical nature of a Structure in a graphical form

Dependency grammar

Dependency grammar is a different type of approach in which structure is determined by the relations (such as grammatical relations) between a word (a head) and its dependents, rather than being based in constituent structure. Dependency grammar (DG is a class of syntactic theories developed by Lucien Tesnière. In Linguistics, grammatical functions or ( grammatical relations) refer to syntactic relationships between Parts of speech such as subject In linguistics the head is the word that determines the syntactic type of the Phrase of which it is a member or analogously the stem that determines the For example, syntactic structure is described in terms of whether a particular noun is the subject or agent of the verb, rather than describing the relations in terms of trees (one version of which is the parse tree) or other structural system. For English usage of verbs see the wiki article English verbs. A parse tree or concrete syntax tree is an (ordered rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some

Some dependency-based theories of syntax:

• Algebraic syntax
• Word grammar
• Operator Grammar

Stochastic/probabilistic grammars/network theories

Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic grammars. Recursive categorical syntax, also sometimes called algebraic syntax, is an algebraic theory of Syntax developed by Michael Brame as an Word grammar is a grammar model developed by Richard Hudson in the 1980s Operator Grammar is a mathematical theory of human Language that explains how language carries Information. Probability theory is the branch of Mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena A stochastic grammar ( statistical grammar) is a Grammar framework with a Probabilistic notion of Grammaticality: Stochastic context-free One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or connectionism. Traditionally the term neural network had been used to refer to a network or circuit of biological neurons. Connectionism is an approach in the fields of Artificial intelligence, Cognitive psychology / Cognitive science, Neuroscience and Philosophy Some theories based within this approach are:

• Optimality theory
• Stochastic context-free grammar

Functionalist grammars

Functionalist theories, although focused upon form, are driven by explanation based upon the function of a sentence (i. Optimality Theory (OT is a linguistic model originally proposed by the linguists Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1993 A stochastic context-free grammar ( SCFG; also probabilistic context-free grammar, PCFG) is a Context-free grammar in which each production is e. its communicative function). Some typical functionalist theories include:

• Functional grammar (Dik)
• Prague Linguistic Circle
• Systemic functional grammar
• Cognitive grammar
• Construction grammar (CxG)
• Role and reference grammar (RRG)

See also

Syntactic terms

Notes

References

• Brown, Keith; Jim Miller (eds. ) (1996). Concise Encyclopedia of Syntactic Theories. New York: Elsevier Science. ISBN 0-08-042711-1.  
• Carnie, Andrew (2006). Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 1405133848.  
• Freidin, Robert; Howard Lasnik (eds. ) (2006). Syntax, Critical Concepts in Linguistics. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-24672-5.  
• Graffi, Giorgio (2001). 200 Years of Syntax. A Critical Survey, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 98. Amsterdam: Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-4587-8.  

External links

• The syntax of natural language (Beatrice Santorini & Anthony Kroch, University of Pennsylvania)
• Various syntactic constructs used in computer programming languages
• The journal Syntax