Worksheet 3 – Linguistics Eng B1
Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
Syntax
Syntax is the branch of grammar which studies the rules governing the way words are combined to form
sentences in a language. Sentences are made up of phrases. Phrases are built around a ‘skeleton’
consisting of two levels, as depicted below:
NP VP PP (phrase level)
N V Prep (word level)
sheep (eat grass) (all animals) eat (he went) in (head)
There are different ways of indicating word relationships. In English, word order is used to indicate such
relationships: Martin saw Mary in Paris / Mary saw Martin in Paris (≠ meaning). Other languages may
use other systems to indicate word relationships, for example inflections (used in Latin) or the
combination of grammatical particles. A combination of grammatical particles is used in agglutinating
languages, such as Finnish and Turkish, where words have a complex morphological structure, but each
morpheme has a single clearly identifiable function, see the example below with affixes in Turkish (from
O’Grady, Dobrovolsky & Aronoff, 1991: 314):
ev house
evler houses
evlerde in the houses
evlerden from the houses
In sentence analysis, you analyze linguistic units as components of larger constructions such as phrases,
clauses, and sentences. It divides sentences into the immediate constituents that make them up. You
are familiar with this from the grammar course in English A.
Tree diagrams
1. Draw tree diagrams and provide rewrite rules for the following:
a. The boy devoured the sandwich.
b. The girl placed the keys on the table.
1
This worksheet was developed by Pia Sundqvist (Linguistics B spring -10). Some changes have been made by MKS.
