1. What are morphology and syntax?
1.2. What is syntax?
Syntax is the study of sentence and phrase structure. In other words, syntax is the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.
A phrase is any grammatically well-formed string of words. Some examples of English phrases are shown in (1).
| (1) | a. | a pumpkin pie |
| b. | down the stairs | |
| c. | very hungry | |
| d. | after the truly serious and unfortunate events of last night | |
| e. | rode their bikes to school every day |
A sentence, on the other hand, is a phrase that forms a complete thought. Some examples of English sentences are shown in (2).
| (2) | a. | A pumpkin pie rested on the windowsill. |
| b. | I rolled a ball down the stairs. | |
| c. | Eliud Kipchoge was very hungry after winning the marathon. | |
| d. | I decided to talk to my therapist after the truly serious and unfortunate events of last night. | |
| e. | My children rode their bikes to school every day until it got too cold. |
Both phrases and sentences consist of strings of words, but is any string of words allowed? Consider the strings of words in (3). Compared to (1), they are scrambled and do not make much sense. In linguistics, we put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of an example to indicate that it is not well-formed. From the examples in (3), we can see that the order of the words matter.
| (3) | a. | *pumpkin a pie |
| b. | *the stairs down | |
| c. | *hungry very | |
| d. | *after truly the serious unfortunate and night events last of | |
| e. | *their rode every day to bikes school |
Interestingly, we are able to identify if a sentence or phrase is well-formed even if we don’t understand all of the words used in the sentence. In (4), I give an example with nonce (made-up) words. Even though you can’t understand the sentence (because I just made up most of the words in it!), you can still tell that the words are in the right order and the sentence is well-formed.
| (4) | The osathies pishdupped the sudfy daigus. |
Language profile: English
English is one of the most spoken languages of the world, with nearly 380 million first-language speakers and over 1 billion second-language speakers (Eberhard et al. 2023). It originated in England when people from northwestern Germany (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) invaded England in the fifth century, which had previously been inhabited by Celtic peoples.
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. But it is also heavily influenced by some other languages. In 1066, the Norman French invaded England. They spoke a dialect of French and brought many French words into English, including court, crown, village, diamond, feast, and cream. Their influence also caused major changes in the grammatical structure of English. The variety of English spoken before the Norman invasion is known as Old English, while the variety of English spoken afterwards is known as Middle English. We now speak a variety known as Modern English, which is normally considered to have been spoken since around the year 1500 (Denning et al. 2007).
Because the British Empire took control of so many countries worldwide, English is spoken in dozens of countries, each of which has its own dialects and varieties of English—often more than one! All of these dialects have unique linguistic properties and a rich cultural heritage. You can listen to audio recordings of many different dialects and accents at the International Dialects of English Archive.
Word order patterns vary from language to language. In English, we put prepositions (words like in, at, on, and to) before the noun they go with. But in many of the world’s languages, the same kind of word goes after the noun. In those languages, they are called postpositions instead. Japanese and Turkish are both examples of languages with postpositions, as shown in example (5).
| (5) | a. | Japanese | |
| nihon | ni | ||
| Japan | in | ||
| ‘in Japan’ | |||
| (5) | b. | Turkish | |
| vapur | ile | ||
| boat | with | ||
| ‘with a boat’ | |||
(Pereltsvaig 2021: 98, 100)
In the Japanese example in (5a), the postposition ni meaning ‘in’ comes after the word nihon meaning ‘Japan’ to form the phrase ‘in Japan.’ In the Turkish example in (5b), the postposition ile meaning ‘with’ comes after the word vapur meaning ‘boat’ to form the phrase ‘with a boat.’
Formatting linguistic data
Linguists use very specific conventions for formatting and discussing linguistic data. We will learn together about how to format and discuss examples in Chapter 4. However, as you read this textbook and other linguistics resources, you should pay attention to how examples are formatted and discussed, so that you can learn how to format and discuss data in your own work. Look for patterns and conventions, what works well, and what could be clearer.
Did you know? Adpositions
If you do not want to distinguish between postpositions and prepositions, you can use the word adposition.
According to Dryer (2013), about half of the world’s languages use prepositions and about half of the world’s languages use postpositions. A minority of languages do something else, such as not using adpositions at all, putting adpositions in the middle of words, or allowing adpositions to appear on either side of the noun.
Some of the things we study in syntax include the following:
- We look at how words are grouped into sentences and phrases.
- We classify phrases and sentences based on their structural, functional, and meaning properties.
- We determine the possible word orders of different kinds of phrases in particular languages.
- We determine whether words or phrases have relationships with other words or phrases in a sentence and how that affects their placement or their morphological form.
- We look for similarities and differences in phrase and sentence structure across languages.
- We create models to describe how each of the components of syntax interact to form phrases and sentences.
- We study how the structure of phrases and sentences interacts with other components of language, such as semantics.
One of the things that sets human language apart from other types of communication is how we are able to create new, specific meanings by combining words in a structured way. We do not merely string words together and guess at or infer how the different words are related. Their relationships are explicitly encoded through syntax—which is why we can say unlikely or even illogical things and have the meaning come through clearly.
This property is rather curious and unique. Emojis do not have it. When scientists have taught primates to sign, there is little evidence for syntactic structure in their communication. But without it, would we be able to have philosophical treatises or science fiction novels?
Key takeaways
- Syntax is the study of phrase and sentence structure.
- A phrase is any well-formed string of words, while a sentence forms a complete thought.
- In linguistics, we put an asterisk (*) in front of phrases and sentences that are not well-formed.
- Different languages have different word order patterns. For example, some languages have prepositions that go before the noun while other languages have postpositions that come after the noun.
Check yourself!
Consult the following data in answering the check yourself questions:
| (6) | Boumaa Fijian | |||||
| au | na | talai | Elia | i | ‘Orovou | |
| I | FUTURE | send | Elia | to | ‘Orovou | |
| ‘I’ll send Elia to ‘Orovou.’ | ||||||
(Dixon 1988: 216, as cited by Dryer: 2013)
| (7) | Lezgian | ||
| duxturrin | patariw | fena | |
| doctors | to | went | |
| ‘She went to doctors.’ | |||
(Haspelmath 1993: 218, as cited by Dryer: 2013)
References and further resources
For a general audience
🧠 CrashCourse. 2020. Syntax – Morphosyntax: Crash Course Linguistics #3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1r1grQiLdk
For linguistics students
Denning, Keith, Brett Kessler, and William R. Leben. 2007. English Vocabulary Elements. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
🔍 Doner, Julie and Tim Mills. 2020. Why we do syntax. Word to the Whys. Teaching in Linguistics Community of Practice. Podcast. https://sites.google.com/view/word-to-the-whys-podcast/home/syntax
Pereltsvaig, Asya. 2021. Languages of the World: An Introduction. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Academic sources
Dryer, Matthew. 2013. Order of adposition and noun phrase. In WALS Online (v2020.3), ed. Matthew Dryer and Martin Haspelmath. Zenodo. http://wals.info/chapter/85
📑 Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2023. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 26th edition. Dallas, TX: SIL International. http://www.ethnologue.com.uml.idm.oclc.org
🔍 Meier, Cameron (executive editor). 2023. International Dialects of English Archive. https://www.dialectsarchive.com
The study of the structure of sentences and phrases; the study of how we combine words and encode the relationships between them.
Any grammatically well-formed string of words.
A grammatically well-formed string of words that communicates a complete thought.
A made-up word for one-time use.
The variety of English spoken before the Norman invasion of England in 1066.
The variety of English spoken after the Norman invasion of England in 1066 until approximately the year 1500.
The varieties of English spoken from approximately the year 1500 until the present day.
A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs before the noun. See also adposition.
A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase and that occurs after the noun. See also adposition.
A preposition or a postposition. A word describing the relationship between a noun and another part of the phrase.
The study of the conventional meaning of language, including the meaning of individual words (lexical semantics) and how meaning is derived from their combination (compositional semantics).
