Syntactic categories are the building blocks of language, organizing words into functional groups. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs form the major categories, while prepositions and conjunctions play supporting roles in sentence structure.
Constituency groups words into units, creating a hierarchical structure in sentences. Analyzing constituents helps us understand how phrases and clauses combine to form complex sentences, revealing the underlying patterns of language.
Syntactic Categories
Major syntactic categories
- Nouns represent people (teacher), places (Paris), things (book), or ideas (freedom) function as subjects, objects, or complements in sentences
- Verbs express actions (run), states (exist), or occurrences (happen) serve as main predicate of sentence
- Adjectives modify nouns or pronouns describe qualities (red) or attributes (intelligent)
- Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs provide information about manner (quickly), time (yesterday), place (here), or degree (very)
- Prepositions show relationships between words indicate spatial (under), temporal (before), or logical (despite) connections
Concept of constituency
- Constituency groups words functioning as single unit within larger structure (the big dog)
- Constituents can be replaced by single word of same category (it)
- Hierarchical organization composes sentences of nested constituents
- Larger constituents contain smaller ones (The [big [red] dog])
- Phrase structure forms constituents into phrases (noun phrases, verb phrases)
- Phrases combine to form clauses and sentences
Analysis of constituent structure
- Constituency tests:
- Substitution: replace group of words with pronoun (The man in the hat → He)
- Movement: shift group of words within sentence (In the hat, the man stood)
- Coordination: join similar constituents with conjunctions (The man in the hat and the woman in the coat)
- Tree diagrams represent hierarchical structure visually show relationships between constituents
- Immediate constituent analysis breaks sentences into progressively smaller parts identifies heads and complements within phrases
Lexical vs functional categories
- Lexical categories include open class words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) carry primary meaning in sentences accept new members over time (selfie)
- Functional categories include closed class words (determiners, auxiliaries, conjunctions) provide grammatical information and structure limited in number rarely accept new members
- Roles in sentence formation:
- Lexical categories form core meaning of phrases (big dog)
- Functional categories connect and modify lexical elements (the big dog)
- Interaction between categories:
- Functional categories often determine distribution of lexical items (a book vs books)
- Combination of both types creates well-formed sentences