Syntactic Relations

Syntactic Relations

Meaning of Syntactic relations:-

          Sentence is a series of words and grammar is connected with analysis of these structure and regular patterns of sentences. A word is a basic grammatical unit and grammar deals with the inter-relations of words in a sentence. This is the province of Syntax. Syntax is the important part of grammar. In the past sentence, structure was given less important than word structure, and it is sometimes badly neglected in teaching of languages. Languages very form one another in the mater of word formation. Latin, ancient Greek and Sanskrit have a great deal of such variation.  The confusion of grammar with morphology leads to the absurd statements such as ‘English has less grammar than Latin’. And that ‘Chinese has no grammar”. If a language has no grammar, no order of words in sentence. It would be very difficult to learn it by native speaker or a by a foreigner. Even two persons can not understand each other properly.

“A language without grammar is like a body without soul.”

          Morphology and syntax of sentence may vary from language to language, but the syntactic classification and ordering of words in sentences are essential parts of the grammar of every language. For example, in English a sentence may be ‘the men eat’, but it can not be ‘men to eat’. This shows the essential basis of syntax. The words can not be put together in any order. The total meaning of a sentence depends on word-order as we find in the pair of sentence such as ‘the tigers killed the hunter’ and ‘the hunter killed the tigers.’

Three classes

          Syntactic relations are fundamentally very simple. They fall into three classes, position relations, relation of co-occurrence and relation of substitutability. 

The positional relations are overt relations. They deal with the comparison of ordered series of sentences with one another.

Secondly by relations of co-occurrence means that the words of different sets may permit the occurrence of a word of another set to form a sentence. Thus in English words of class, ‘man’, ‘horse’ may be followed by words of class ‘eat’, ‘live’ etc. the strong horse’ is the only permitted order of these three words.

The third relation substitutability means the sets of words substitutable for each in the same sentence structure. In English the group ‘the man’ is substitutable for ‘man’ , strong man’ is also substitutable  for ‘man’. In ‘the came yesterday’, ‘came’, could be substituted in the place of yesterday’. ‘he came’ is a sentence but not ‘yesterday he’.

Word-classes:-

          In a language words could be classified into word-classes according to their syntactic relations with one another in sentences. In English, we find classes such as horse-horses, maintains-maintain-maintaining-maintained- and hot-hottest as well as strictly limited classes such as, I, me we, us, he him, thy, them etc.

          Similarly some words have syntactic relations with one another such as, ‘pretty tree’ and ‘beautiful tree’, ‘big house and sizable house, hotter climate and more temperate climate. These are the examines of syntactic grouping of words. Thus on can say in English, ‘this is a tree’, this is a pretty this, this a beautiful tree, this a prettier tree and this is more beautiful tree. This shows adjective noun or adverb- adjective +noun relationship. There can be adverb-adjective groups of words also.

          Some words form a group by the use of preposition. The preposition such as at, with, from, precede nouns to form groups substitutable for adverb for example, he came with speech, he came quickly, he will discuss it at supper he will discuss it then, he comes form London, he comes often etc. these words are usually called prepositions and are distinguished such by this syntactic function. Sentences ending with preposition are very common such as Where have you come from? What are you at? And what you up to?

use of conjunctions.

          Still there are other groups of words by the use of conjunctions. They are preceded a conjunction, otherwise they could considered as complete independent sentences, such as ,He will have it if he sees it, he came home because he feel ill, he came gone quickly as he was tired,

          Grammatically speaking, words are classified under the title part of speech, noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction , article and interjection.

their different formal behaviour

          Further; words are classified by their different formal behaviour. This means that some words are classified under more than one head. The classes, noun, verb and adjective are required for words like death, pursue, and malicious. All these three words belong to one class only. While words like ‘work’ belongs both to the noun and verb classes, as he works well, his word is good, their works are good. In a dictionary also such words have different entries. Side by side the words like ‘mature’ belong to the verb and the adjective classes such as the scheme is maturing, he is a mature artist. Words like; choice; belong to the adjective and noun classes such as the choicest flowers and his choice is fine.

          The English word ‘round’ belong to five classes,

noun in ‘one round is enough’,

verb ‘you round the bend quickly’,

adjective in ‘a round tower’,

 adverb in he wandered around the garden.

membership

          Word classes may be open or closed in membership. In open class the membership is principally unlimited. It varies from time to time and between one speaker and another. Most of the loan-words and newly created words belong to open class. Closed classes contain a fixed and usually small number of member words which are the same for all the speakers of language or the dialect. In English, noun, adjectives, adverbs and verbs are open classes; pronoun, preposition and conjunctions are closed classes.

Immediate Constituents:-

Meaning:-

          Sentence are not merely strings of word in an acceptable order and ‘making sense’ they are arranged in successive components which are made of groups of words and of single words, these groups and sing words are called constituents. When they are considered as separate parts of sentence, they are called ‘immediate constituents’.