Analysing English Sentences

Overview

In broad terms, this book is concerned with syntax in general, and with the syntax of English in particular. Syntax is one of the two key areas of what is traditionally called ‘grammar’ – the other being morphology. Morphology is the study of how words are formed out of smaller units (called morphemes) and so addresses questions such as ‘What are the component morphemes of a word like antidisestablishmentarianism, and what is the nature of the operations by which they are combined together to form the overall word?’ Syntax is the study of the way in which phrases and sentences are structured out of words, and so addresses questions like ‘What is the structure of a sentence like Where's the president going? and what is the nature of the grammatical operations by which its component words are combined together to form the overall sentence structure?’ This chapter begins (in §1.2) by looking at a range of approaches to the study of grammar, before going on (in §1.3) to look at how syntax was studied in traditional grammar: this also provides an opportunity to introduce some useful grammatical terminology. In the remainder of the chapter, we look at the approach to syntax adopted within the theory of Universal Grammar/UGdeveloped by Chomsky over the past six decades. (Note that a convention used throughout the book is that key technical terms are in bold print when first introduced in a given chapter; such terms are generally given an entry in the Glossary at the end of the book if they are used in several different sections of the book, though not if they occur in only one section of the book and are glossed there.)

Approaches to grammar

A fundamental question that needs to be resolved at the outset concerns what kind of approach to adopt in studying grammar. There are two diametrically opposed answers to this question found in work on grammar. One sees the role of grammar as being essentially prescriptive (i.e. prescribing norms for grammatical correctness, linguistic purity and literary excellence); the other sees the role of grammar as being inherently descriptive (i.e describing the way people speak or write their native language).