Chapter 5 Syntax: The Analysis of Sentence Structure

5.1 Grammaticality

　 The term syntax is from the ancient Greek word syntaxis, which literally means “arrangement” or “setting out together”. Traditionally, it refers to the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence. In English and in every language a sentence is a sequence of words arranged in a certain order in accordance with grammatical rules. Sequences of words that conform to the rules are well formed or grammatical, and those that do not are not acceptable to native speakers of the language. Native speakers of a language know intuitively what strings of words are grammatical and what are ungrammatical. Here is a list of English word sequences.

　　(1) Jack found the book.
　　(2) Jack put the book.
　　(3) Jack wandered the man.
　　(4) Jack wandered with the man.
　　(5) Jack looked after the man.
　　(6) Jack wanted the man to be his servant.
　　(7) Jack promised the man to go there.
　　(8) Jack persuaded the man to go there.
　　(9) Jack suggested the man to go there.
　　(10) Jack hopes that the man goes there.
　　(11) Jack hopes the man to go there.
　　(12) Jack wishes to go with the man.
　　(13) Jack wishes the man to go with him.
　　(14) Jack wishes the man a pleasant trip.
　　(15) Jack wishes the man unwise.
　　(16) Jack calls the man Zack.
　　(17) Jack regards the man Zack.
　　(18) Jack takes the man for Zack.
　　(19) Jack considers the man for Zack.
　　(20) Jack named the man after Zack.

　 You as a teacher and/or a learner of English will find some of the strings peculiar or odd in some way. We predict that native speakers of English will pick out (2), (3), (9), (11), (13), (17), and (19) as unacceptable. If they agree that these strings of words are not well formed, this shows that grammatical judgement is based on shared knowledge of sentence structure. In other words, there are rules or regularities which govern the formation of sentences. The main task of syntactic studies is to describe the shared knowledge of native speakers of sentence structure.