Yule's Chapter 9 "Syntax"

In Chapter 9, Yule teaches us about Syntax. Syntax is a word that originally comes from Greek and it means putting together or arranging the elements in a linear structure of a sentence. It is the analysis of the structure of phrases and sentences. Therefore, Chapter 9 is basically about the rules we use to form a sentence.

In Syntax, there are many different forms or structures that help make a sentence. For example in this chapter, I learned about the Deep and surface structure. I also learned about generative grammar and its “all and only” criterion, which means that the grammar we use must generate all the grammatical sentences and only the grammatical sentences, nothing else. I also learned in the chapter that deep structure is when we use phrase structure rules, while surface structure is otherwise known as a transformational grammar. It is the structure of individual sentences, after the applications of transformational rules.

In chapter 9, I also learned about the symbols used in syntactic description. For example, I learned that there are symbols such as ‘S’ for sentence, ‘NP’ for noun phrases, ‘N’ for noun, ‘Art’ for article and so on. On the other hand there are also many different symbols that are used, such as brackets and parenthesis. When parenthesis are used, it means that whatever occurs inside of them will be treated as an optional constituent, while brackets represent the only elements that must be selected.

Lastly in this chapter, I learned that syntax has many different rules, such as Lexical and transformational rules, which have to do with phrase structure rules. I also learned about tree diagrams and how it’s a diagram that is divided into many different branches, that show the “hierarchical organization” of sentence structures.