CHAPTER OUTLINE
So, let's start. In the introduction we stated, very ambitiously, that by studying the rules underlying proper English sentences we may ultimately be able to better understand what is going on in the human mind or brain. So how do we study those rules? We will begin by looking at simple sentences and reveal an important insight: syntactic rules do not apply to particular words, but rather to particular categories that words belong to, e.g. nouns and verbs. That simple but fundamental insight already reduces the number of potential syntactic rules in a drastic way, and therefore saves us a lot of work. Moreover, we will see that words belong to a particular category because they carry features that are purely syntactic, and that must be distinguished from features that tell you how to pronounce those words or that tell you what they mean. These features will play a very important role throughout the book, and, for starters, they will help us make a first syntactic discovery: there are words that are never uttered.
Insight: Words and Categories
Syntax tries to understand why certain sentences (like Mary loves Suzanne) are good English sentences, whereas other ones (such as loves Mary Suzanne or Mary snores Suzanne) are bad English sentences. What causes them to be either good or bad?
Language consists of words. Words are elements that can be combined into sentences. In a way, you can think of words as the building blocks (like Lego blocks) with which sentences can be built. A simple sentence like Mary loves Suzanne consists of three words. The first idea therefore might be to say that there are certain rules in language (in this case, the English language) that allow the words loves, Suzanne and Mary to be combined in a particular order.
In essence, then, you need rules. If there weren't any rules, nobody could explain the correctness, often called the grammaticality, of some sentences and the ungrammaticality of others. There would be no way of stating the distinction if there were no rules. But how specific must these rules be?
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