Syntactic Units
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Date
2018-10-15
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General Studies Division, University of Ilorin, Ilorin
Abstract
SYNTACTIC UNITS
Introduction
Language is purely conventional and systematic. There is nothing sacrosanct about the convention of a given language than its acceptability over a given period of time. Learning the rules governing the construction of a given language usually has a great impact on an individual’s language skills. According to Robins (1985) cited in Syal and Jindal (2001, p.3); “language is a symbol system based on pure or arbitrary conventions... infinitely extendable and modifiable according to the changing needs and conditions of the speakers.” In English, there are five levels of grammatical analysis namely: morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence. These levels are in layers and each constitutes the building block of language. To construct an error free sentence, words are put together in a rule-governed way. The third level of the grammatical analysis is known as the phrase. When one talks about a word, one is talking about a part of speech but the moment one begins to talk about more than one word, one has begun to talk about a phrase or a clause. In other words, both the phrase and the clause are usually made up of more than one word. A phrase is therefore defined as a syntactic unit/group of words without a finite verb. For example, the word ‘man’ is a noun (part of speech) but the moment one adds a grammatical element like ‘the’ to form ‘the man’, this will no longer be regarded as a word but a phrase. A word, however, can constitute a phrase where there is zero satellite, e.g. the underlined (Bola) is a noun phrase in the context of the sentence: Bola is here.
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Levels of grammatical analysis:, morpheme,, word,, phrase,, clause,, sentence