Introducing Linguistics Theoretical and Applied Approaches

Chapter 5 examines syntax, how sentences and phrases are built. It explores the relation between structure and meaning, showing how structure allows us to clarify ambiguity. Readers see how sentences are made up of phrases that in turn are made up of different words. These words belong to specific categories, with the category of the phrase determined by its head. The chapter explains the distinction between lexical and functional categories and presents the two basic processes for building sentences: Merge and move. Readers explore and practice the representation of sentence structure with tree diagrams. They are presented with a template for the representation of structure and shown how to use trees to indicate the difference between complements and adjuncts, and how the tree must represent not only word order but also how different phrases relate to each other. Tense is presented as the head of the sentence, with the verb phrase as its complement. In a parallel fashion, the determiner is presented as the head of the determiner phrase, with the noun phrase as its complement. Different structures such as questions, passives, and relative clauses are introduced and practiced. An appendix details step-by-step how to build syntactic trees.