Syntax

Welcome to week six. Now that we have discussed the sound of language, as well as the parts and the meanings of words and phrases, we are going to examine how these pieces come together to form language structures. Syntax refers to the arrangement of and relations between words, phrases, and sentences.

Computers are inflexible machines that understand what you type only if you type it in the exact form that the computer expects, and they will continue to do so until AI (artificial Intelligence) is finally achieved. The expected form is called the syntax. Each program defines its own syntactical rules that control which words the computer understands, which combinations of words are meaningful, and what punctuation is necessary.   

Linguistically, of course, syntax is the study of the rules that govern structure in human languages, but the example about “computer language” illustrates the importance of such language structures involved in syntax. Syntax refers to the combination of words into higher groups such as phrases, clauses, and sentences, the function of those groups, and their relationships with other groups.  Although computers are “narrow-minded” to a degree, compared to the human capacity to “decode” language, a wrong combination of words will also produce the same misunderstanding among speakers of a human language.
Educators of language often emphasize parts of speech as fundamental parts of Grammar that will enable students to understand the role of words in higher groups.  However, parts of speech is more a lexical issue than a grammatical one. By discriminating between nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs (as content words) or prepositions, articles, determiners, conjunctions, etc (as function words) we are focusing on word classes more than syntactic constituents (phrases) within the sentence.

This week, we will discuss the basic components of various forms of phrases and sentences in English and apply these patterns to our content and language instruction with ELLs. We will also identify some syntactical interferences of other languages and consider the implications that these negative transfers may have on our instructional delivery.

VIDEO SESSION # 8
https://youtu.be/n9168PgGHBc