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This post includes a detailed description of syntax examples and it also tells about using examples in syntax.
Use of Linguistic Examples
This blog post explains the concept of “What is Syntax” in detail. It will demonstrate why studying examples of all foreign languages is necessary to understand syntax and syntactic theories.
Let’s have a look at syntax examples:
Why not Just Use Examples from the English Language?
There are two main reasons for using foreign-language examples:
- learn about the differences between languages
- learn about the similarities between them
Differences between Languages
First, languages don’t all look the same, and examining just our language and its immediate relatives doesn’t show how much languages can differ.
Example
Imagine that you’ve met only two languages, English and German, two closely related Germanic languages from northern Europe.
Example (23), from German, is a word-for-word translation of English.
(23) der schöne Wasserfall (German)
the pretty waterfall
You might imagine that the translation of this phrase would look the same in any language: first a word for ‘the’, then a word for ‘pretty’ or ‘beautiful’, then a word for ‘waterfall’. But this is not so.
In Spanish, for instance, we’d get (24):
(24) la cascada hermosa (Spanish)
the waterfall beautiful
‘the beautiful waterfall’
In (25) we see one example, from Spanish:
(25) Es nuevo.
(Spanish) is new
‘It’s new.’
Example (25) has no word for ‘it’; it literally means ‘Is new’ – an impossible sentence in English.
What is Pro Drop Language?
Spanish typically drops the subject pronoun meaning ‘it’ in such examples; for this reason, it’s known as a PRO DROP language. Many languages have examples parallel to this, but confining the discussion to English would never reveal that.
Sameness between Languages
The second reason for looking at examples from other languages is that linguists want to discover the common properties that languages share – their homogeneity or sameness.
One of the most crucial discoveries of modern linguistics is that languages don’t vary from each other at random, but are remarkably alike in many important ways. Certain features occur in all languages.
For instance, every language distinguishes a word class of NOUNS (words like tree, liquid, expression, and enjoyment) from a word class of VERBS (words like liquefy, learn, enjoy, and grow), although some languages have no other major word classes.
To discover this kind of information, linguists need to examine a representative sample of languages from different language families and different geographical areas.
Most linguists want to uncover the central patterns common to all languages. Although specific constructions are not generally universal (= common to all languages), all languages use a subset of the same basic tools of grammar. Each language has a word list or LEXICON which its speakers share, and that word list always contains words from several different classes.
All languages combine these words into phrases and sentences, and speakers can manipulate the order of the phrases for various purposes – perhaps to ask questions, to emphasize different parts of a sentence, or to show who’s doing what to whom.
