Day 5

Burrowing outwards through our linguistic onion like so many worms, we get to syntax.

Morphology organises morphemes into words. We'll perhaps cover exactly what a word might be in later installments, but suffice to say that native speaker intuition - what you intuitively think of as a word - is usually but not always good enough. It explains why we can say ox-en but not *four-en.

Syntax however organises words into sentences. This explains why you can say The cat sat on the mat but not *Mat the on sat cat the or *The sat on the mat. (A little note on notation - we mark acceptable constructions with a ✓ if we mark them at all. Unacceptable constructions get marked with a *, and questionable ones get a ?.)

Words can be split up into a few categories (or class) just like morphemes, and this determines how they can be put together. Not all languages have all of these types; it seems like the only really necessary ones are nouns and verbs.

We need to be really really careful when talking about these categories. I'll be giving really simplistic definitions (which we might come back and rip apart later) but remember for now that syntax doesn't care about meaning - all it cares about is how words fit together. This is really important! Here's the main ones, especially in English:

Nouns describe objects. These can be concrete like dog or abstract like love or singing. There are also special kinds of nouns called pronouns (he, she, they, it) and proper nouns (France, Jerry) which behave in a slightly odd way.

Adjectives modify nouns, like red or large or diaphonous or inquisitive.


Verbs describe events, like to sing, to yawn, or to fly. More importantly for syntax, they 'rule' the sentence by demanding complements - word classes that must be attached to the verb to form a valid sentence.


Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives or other adverbs like talked simply, simply red or very happily. Adverbs are sometimes treated as a bit of a dumping ground for words which might really deserve their own sub-category.


Adpositions relate two nouns in time or space. Before, in front of, over, under and inside are all adpositions. (We say adpositions because some languages place them after the noun they modify.)


Determiners quantify, define or otherwise perform delicate grammatical functions on nouns. the, an, several, this are all determiners.


Conjunctions connect clauses (sub-sentences or entire sentences) - and, but and when are all conjunctions.

Oops, these list format ones really eat up wordcount. I'll just leave you with the quick note that (in English) the first fourare open classes - that is to say you can invent new words in them relatively easily and convert between the classes (the stonderiffic wugs blimpled glumbily is a perfectly well-formed sentence) and the last three are closed classes - you can't. (*dro cat sat blomb dro mat, glep dro dog stood tomp dro table is totally unacceptable.)

Tomorrow, we start to deal with meaning.