Knowing a language includes the ability to construct phrases and sentences out of morphemes and words. the part of the grammar that represents a speaker's knowledge of these structures and their formation is called syntax. The aim of this chapter is to show you what syntactic structure is and what the rules that determine syntactic structure are like. Most of the examples will be form the syntax of English, but the principles that account for syntactic structures are universal.
Part of what we mean by structure is word order. The meaning of a sentence depends to a great extent on the order in which words occur in a sentence.
Athens defeat sparta, does not have the same meaning as sparta defeat athens.
Sometimes, however, a change of word order has no effect on meaning. Jack horner stuct in his thumb, jack horner stuck his thumb in.
The grammars of all languages includes rules of syntax that reflect speaker's knowledge of these facts.
