Introducing Syntax

We humans are surrounded by technology. We have machines for almost everything and computers allow us to achieve things that were long deemed impossible. We live in a day and age where dreams can become reality overnight due to technical innovation, and the amount of information that we have access to via a tiny machine in our pockets is simply astounding. There is talk right now about flying people to Mars and growing tomatoes there. Yes, we humans are a smart bunch.

Despite all this, there are some things we are still unable to do, and some machines we simply cannot build. And some of these failures have to do with language. A machine that can translate one language into another language perfectly? No, we don't have it (and please don't insult us by referring to Google Translate). Okay, how about something more modest, like a machine that can for any combinations of words in a single language (say, English) say whether it is a good sentence or not? It is perhaps hard to believe but even that is still out of our reach. Language, as it turns out, is an evasive and slippery creature.

At the same time, it is clear that such a machine, capable of stating for every English sentence whether it is grammatical or not, does exist. In fact, we have about 360 million of those machines on our planet. They are called native speakers of English. These speakers have at their disposal the knowledge of their mother tongue, English, and this knowledge can generate zillions of distinct combinations of English words and evaluate each of them, whether old or new, as being either a good sentence or not. Probably you have never heard someone say Syntax is one of the most fascinating topics in linguistic theory, but if you are a native speaker of English you know immediately that the sentence is grammatically correct (and hopefully after reading this book you will also find it to be correct content-wise). So these native speaker brains can do something that we cannot imitate with any man-made machine. The fact that we cannot mimic such everyday human language behaviour shows us that there is something worthwhile studying.