GRAMMAR - SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY

WHAT IS GRAMMAR?

     

     Grammar is how we organise words in phrases and sentences and how we change the form of words to give meaning to what we say or write. An English sentence uses two areas of grammar: 

1. The order of words (syntax).

2. How individual words are structured or made (morphology).

Syntax and morphology work together to give sentences meaning. 

SYNTAX 

     The meaning of bought her she birthday presents lots of is difficult to understand because of the word order. We need to reorder the words to make a sentence that has meaning. The rules of syntax mean that there is normally only one way to order these words in this sentence: She bought her lots of birthday presents. 

Exercise 

Look at the sentence above again. Match the words as they are used in it.

1. She

2. bought 

3. her

4. birthday presents 

a) verb

b) subject 

c) indirect object

d) direct object

Answers

1. b)

2. a)

3. c)

4. d)

● a subject normally comes before a verb 

● an indirect object normally comes after a verb

● a direct object normally comes after a verb. The direct object is the thing which is directly acted by on the verb.

● an indirect object often comes before a direct object. It is possible to write she bought lots of presents for her where the indirect object follows the direct object. The indirect object is the thing that is affected by the verb but is not directly acted on. 

It is our knowledge of syntax that allows us to understand the relationship between words in a sentence and to order them according to the rules. 

MORPHOLOGY

In the word presents, as it is used in the example sentence in the previous section, the s at the end of the word shows us it is a regular plural noun. In the word bought, the combination of letters tell us this verb is in the past. It is different from buys. Knowledge of morphology helps us understand that a word is plural, or is in the past, or is a subject, an object, an adverb and so on. One reason you could understand bought her she birthday presents lots of in the previous section was because the morphology was correct; all you needed to do was reorder the words. However, if the morphology and syntax are seriously incorrect, the meaning becomes very difficult to understand, as in buyed hers her birthday present lots of. 😮