Sentence Structures

Syntax is the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences. Many times the word syntax is used synonymously with the term “sentence structure or sentence patterns.”

There are three basic sentence transformations and six basic sentence patterns:

Affirmative Ann has a problem	Negative Ann doesn’t have a problem.
Statement The president said so.	Question Did the president say so?
Active Ray set the fire.	Passive The fire was set by Ray.

All languages have statements and questions in the affirmative and in the negative, but not all languages share the same sentence patterns. The order in which words or sentence parts appear may change radically from one language to another. For example, in English yes/no statements are usually made into questions by inverting the subject and the verb.