SYNTAX

Syntax is set of rules in a language that determines how words are combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.

PHRASES

Using the rank scale in the grammatical hierarchy, we know that words go to form the next unit of grammar the pharase. Thus words relate to each other syntactically in larger sentences. Pharases then from clauses and clauses form sentences. This is the traditional analysis of the grammatical hierarchy. In modern grammar, however, the term “phrase” is synonymous with the term “clause”. The pharase therefore is a normal categorization of sentence structure or grammatical analysis.

CLAUSES

The categorizing of the pharases erlier into NP, VP, Adj.P, Adj.P and Frep.p was the formal categorization of sentences. Teh constituents of a sentencenwere indentified as the NP, etc. There are categoriesin grammar. However which show how different elements of a clause or sentence relate to each other in meaning. There are the functional categories in grammar, the main ones being the subject and preicates which contain further elements known as

a.       Subject

b.      Verb

c.       Object

d.      Complement

e.      Adverbial

CATEGORISATION OF SENTENCE

Sentence can be categorized according to their communicative function or according to their structural components. The first categorisation sees the sub-types as Statement/declaratives, questions.interrogatives, commands/imperatives, and exclamations/exlamatives. The second categorisation has the sub-types of simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence, and compound-complex sentence.

SENTENCE CONSTRUCTION TYPES

As stated erlier, in syntax, apart from the categorisation f sentences according to their communicative functions, sentences are also classified according to their structural or construction type, based on the presence of the two elements, the subject and the predicate. The Example:

S	P
They	travel by bus daily.
She	eats rice for dinner.
He	Could hardly hear her.
We	Must not go there today.