Part of syntax

Grammatical or ungrammatical ?

The syntactic rules of a grammar also account for the fact that even though the following sequence is made up of meaningful words, it has no meaning.
Thumb in Jack Horner his stuck.

In English and in every language, every sentence is a sequence of word but not every sequence of word is a sentence. sequence of word that conform to the rules of syntax are said to be well formed or grammatical and those that violate the syntactic rules are therefore ill formed or ungrammatical.

What grammaticality is base on
In chapter 1 you were asked to identify strings of words as grammatical or un grammatical according to your linguistic institusions. Here is another word sequences. Disregarding the sentence meaning, use your knowledge of English and place an asterisk in front of the ones that strike you as perculiar or funny in sme way.

1. The boy found the ball.
2. The boy found quickly.
3. The boy found in the house.
4. The boy found the ball in the house.
5. Sylvia slept the baby.
6. Sylvia slept soundly.
7. Tom believes Robert to be a gentleman.
8. Tom believes to be a gentlemen.
9. Tom tries Robert to be a gentlemen.
10. Tom tries to be a gentlemen.
11. Tom wants to be a gentlemen.
12. Tom wants Robert to be a gentlemen.
13. Jack and Jill ran up the hill.
14. Jack and Jill ran up the bill.
15. Jack and Jill ran the hill up.
16. Jack and Jill ran the bill up
17. Up the hill ran Jack and Jill.
18. Up the bill ran Jack and Jill.

We perdict that speaker of English will ' asterisk ' 2,3,5,8,9,15,18.
If we are right, this shows that grammaticality judgents are not idiosyncratic or capricious but are determined by rules that are shared by the speaker of a language.

The syntactic rules that account for the ability to make these judgements include, in addition to rules of word order, other constraints. for examples :

• The rules specify that found must be followed directly by and expression such as the ball but not by quickly or in the house as illustrated in 1 - 4.
• The verb slepp patterns differently from find in that it may be followed solely by a word such as soundly but not by other kinds of phrases such as the baby as shown in 5 and 6.
• Example 7 - 12 show that believe and try function in an opposite fashion while want exihibits yet a third pattern.
• Finally, the word order rules that constrain phrases such as run up the hill differ from those concrening run up the bill as seen in 13 - 18.

 Sentence are not random strings of words. Some strings of words that we can interpret are not sentences. For example, we can understand 15 even though recognise it as ungrammatical. we can fix it up to make it grammatical. To be a sentence, word must conform to specific patterns determined by the syntactic rules of the language.

What grammaticality is not base on

Coloress green ideas sleep foriously. This is very interesting sentence,
because it shows that syntax can be sperated from semantics, that form can be sperated from meaning. The sentence doesn't seem to mean anything coherent, but it sounds like an English sentence.
Howard Lasknik

Grammaticality is not base on what taught in school but on the rules constructed unconsciously when we are childern. Childern aquire most of syntactic rules of their language even before learning to read.

The ability to make grammaticality judgments does not depen on having heard the sentences before. you may never have heard or read the sentence. Enormous crickets in pink socks were dancing at the ball. But your syntactic knowledge tells you that it is grammatical. Grammaticality judgements do not depen on whether the sentence is meaningful or not, as shown by the following sentences :

Colouress green ideas sleep furiously.
A verb crumped the milk.

Although these sentences do not make much sense, they are syntactically well formed. they sound ' funny' but they differ in their ' funniness ' from the following strings of words :

Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.
Milk a crumpled verb a.

You may understand ungrammatical sequences even though you know they are not well formed. To most English speakers :

The boy quickly in the house the ball found.

Is interpretable although these same speaker know that the word order is irregular. On the other hand, un grammatical sentences may be uninterpretable if they include nonsense strings, that is, words with no agreed-on meaning, as shwon by the first two lines of  'Jabberwocky' by Lewis Carroll :

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves.
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe :

Such nonsense poetry is amusing because the sentences comply with syntactic rules and sound like good English. Ungrammatical strings of nonsense words are not entertaining :

Toves slithy the and brillig ' twas
wabe in the gimble and gyre did.

Nor does grammaticality depend on the truth of sentences ( if it did, lying would be impossible ), nor on whether real object are being discussed, nor on whether something is possible. Untrue sentences can be ungrammatical, sentences discussing unicorns can be grammatical, and sentence referring to pregnant fathers can be grammatical.
Unconscious knowledge of the syntactic rules of grammar permits speakers to make grammaticality judgments.