Organizing Words in Phrases and Sentences

1. Sentence patterns

we can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences

The kind-hearted boy had many girlfriends.

The kind-hearted, intelligent boy had many girlfriends.

The kind-hearted, intelligent, handsome boy had many girlfriends.

………………………………………………………………………….

Mary went to the movies.

Mary went to the movies and ate popcorn.

Mary went to the movies, ate popcorn,and drank coke.

………………………………………………………………………….

The cat chased the mouse.

The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese.

The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese that I brought.

………………………………………………………………………….

sentences are not stored in a dictionary format in our memory

 sentences are composed from discrete units

2. Grammatical or ungrammatical

 every sentence is a sequence of words

The kind-hearted boy had many girlfriends.

The cat chased the mouse that ate the cheese.

Mary went to the movies.

 not every sequence of wordsis a sentence

*The boy kind-hearted girlfriends many had.

*Chased the mouse ate the cheese the cat that.

*To the movies went Mary.

words are combined in sequences by the rules of syntax

syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence

sequences of wordsthat conform to the rules of syntax are grammatical

3. The syntactic module of grammar

accounts for the structure (= the form) of grammatically acceptable sentences

defines the constituents of sentences

 accounts for the structure of sentence constituents

 describes the rules that specify how words are combined in grammatically acceptable units – phrases and sentences

contains the most powerful, creative aspect of the grammar:
our ability to create and understand an infinite number of sentences

Compare with the morphological module of grammar:

morphology

the "highest" (i.e., largest) morphological units are words themselves
the lowest (i.e., smallest) morphological units are morphemes (roots and affixes)
in between words and their constituent morphemes are intermediate units -stems

the organization of sentences is analogous to that of words

the "highest" (i.e., largest) syntactic units are sentences themselves
the lowest (i.e., smallest) syntactic units are words
in between sentences as a whole and their constituent words are intermediate units –phrases - a word or group of words functioning as a syntactic unit between the level of individual words and the sentence as a whole