4 - SYNTAX

Summary

General background

The study of syntax is the study of the patterns by which morphemes and grammatical categories such as Noun, Adjective, Verb, Preposition and conjunctions are organised into sentences.

To understand the syntax of a language fully, one needs to have access to grammaticality judgements. For example, to understand how the perfect works in English one needs to know not only that She has arrived is possible, that is, that it is part of the system of English, but also that ** She has arrived yesterday is not (** signals that the pattern is not part of the structure of the language, or at least of the variety in question; as is traditional in historical grammars, * is reserved for reconstructed, hypothetical forms). To understand the interaction of indefinite Noun Phrases and subject, one must know that ** A man is over there is not part of the system, whereas There is a man over there is. We obviously have only partial access to the syntax of an earlier stage of a language. This is in part because we have only indirect access to any grammaticality judgements, usually through the negative evidence of absence of a pattern, sometimes through inferences that can be drawn from crosslinguistic generalisations about constraints on possible syntactic patterns given certain word orders, etc. In part, it is because we have access only to written, not to spoken language. Furthermore, in the case of Old English (OE), much of the prose is dependent on Latin (this is particularly true of the interlinear glosses).