Syntax

Syntax 

Syntax is the study of the structure of sentences, the principles, both universal and language specific, that govern how words are assembled to yield grammatical sentences.

Syntax discussed about structure,function,categorized,and role of syntax,and then tools that use in build it. Units of syntax such as: word,phrase,clause,sentence and discouce.

The Representations of Syntax

In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for instance, for the following sentence:

"The boy kicked the ball"

The syntax can be described, by the following methods:

1. A statement of the correct sequence of the parts of speech (or Syntactic Categories):

Subject is followed by verb is followed by object.

In the above example,

subject = "The boy" (article followed by noun)

verb = "kicked"

object = "The ball" (article followed by noun)

 

2. by a series of transformational rules

For example:

Where in the above example,

3. By parsing diagrams

Here, the parts of a sentence are shown in a graphical way that emphasises the hierarchical relationships between the components of a sentence. For example:

Where:

Subject = “the boy” (article + noun)

Verb = “kicked”

Object = “the ball” (article + noun)

The above structure is the basic syntactic structure for a sentence in the English language. As more complex sentences are considered, it is easy, by this method, to see how these different structures relate to each other, by further breaking down the branches of the structure. The syntax of the language contains the rules which govern the structure of phrases and how these can be joined together. The structures and associated rules vary from one language to another.

Parsing diagrams are capable of representing not just one particular language’s grammar but are capable of representing any kind of grammar. For instance, they can be used to represent the rules of invented languages such as computer programming languages.

This method of representation is the one that I will use to represent musical structures because of the graphic nature of the representation and the flexibility of the approach. By this method, we can show the types of syntactic structures in music and show how they relate to each other by expending or contracting branches of the structure.

Examples of More Complex Syntactic Structures in language

1. Embedding

It is possible to construct sentences which are more complex than the example above. This is done by embedding further phrases within the basic structure. For example, in the sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball."

"with red shorts" is a prepositional phrase that further describes “the boy” .

This can be represented, within the basic sentence structure, as follows:

Here we can see how the Prepositional Phrase (PP) “with red shorts” is embedded within the subject Noun Phrase (NP) so that the subject is subdivided into a Noun Phrase and Prepositional Phrase (PP). The Prepositional Phrase itself contains a further Noun Phrase. The parsing diagram clearly shows the hierarchical relationship between the sentence and its components. There are many other ways of extending this structure by embedding subordinate phrases at different parts of the basic structure.

2. Conjoining.

It is also possible to extend sentences by joining together complete structures or complete and incomplete structures, for example:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball and scored a goal"

The conjunction “and” joins together the complete sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball"

and the verb phrase:

“scored a goal"

This could be represented as follows: