What is Syntax? REVIEW OF LITERATURE

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF LITERATURE

2.1 What is Syntax? One of the branches of linguistics that talks about sentence or clause is Syntax. English Syntax was concerned with how we studied sentences. Syntaxis not only related to the structure of sentences, but also to structure of phrases and clauses. Baker 1989:03 says, “By the Syntax of a language, we mean the body of rules that speakers of the language follow when they combine words into sentences.” Thus, when we investigate English Syntax, we will trying to study the rules which underline how English speakers combine words to make sentences. In addition to referring to the discipline, the term Syntax is also used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language. Modern research in Syntax attempts to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professional in this discipline attempt to find general rules that applied to all natural languages. The term Syntax is also used to refer to the rules governing the behavior of mathematical systems, such as formal languages used in logic. For centuries, work in Syntax was dominated by a framework known as grammaire générale, first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld in a book of the same title. This system took as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and therefore there is a single, most natural way to express a thought. The writer of this thesis wants to show the readers some definitions of Syntax given by the Linguistics below:  Linda 1993:01 states, “Syntax describes the way words fit together to form sentences”. She adds one way to study syntax is to look at sentences which are already known to be considered syntactically ‘well-formed’ sentences to the speakers of that language.  John Lyons 1981:103 states, “Syntax deals with the distribution of words i.e word-forms”.  Jim Miller 2002: xii states, “Syntax has to do with how words are put together to build phrases, with how phrases are put together to build sentences.”  Andrew Carnie 2001:4 states, “Syntax is the cover term for studies of this level of langauge.” From the definitions above, we know that Syntax is the study of words which put together to build sentence through human expression.

2.2 Types of Sentence