LINGUISTICS

Sentence Patterns

The distinction between content (or lexical) words and function (or structural) words is maintained by most structural linguists. Lexical words express primarily lexical (or content) meaning and function words convey primarily grammatical meaning, though the distinction between the two of meaning is not always clear-cut.

                        The                     soldier                   polishes        his  shoes

                        Our                     teacher                   preaper         many         exercises

                        That                    driver                     registers        three          trucks

                        A                        mother                   inspects        the ward

The four sentences above refer to quite different people and situation. In other words, they differ in lexical meaning. However, they have the same grammatical meaning in that the first word is determine, the second a noun, the third a verb, the fourth a determiner and the fifth a noun. That is, each sentence is made up of the same sequence word classes.

                        Det.                    Noun                     verb              det             Noun

The grammatical meaning shared by the sentences is the grammatical pattern or syntactical arrangement. The linguist tries to find out what the syntactical arrangements in his corpus are by listing them.

                        The                     man                       shot              the             bulgar

                        Det.                    Noun                     verb              det.             Noun

Dewi   wore    a          frilly    dress    to         the       party

Noun   verb     det.      Adj.     noun    prep.    Det.     Noun

A         sick      woman                        called   the       doctor

Det.     Adj.     noun                verb     det.      Noun

Professional     singers             take     special food

Adj      noun    verb                 adj.      noun

After many such listings, the linguist may conclude that the underlying grammatical pattern to all the sentences is :

Noun   verb     noun

One procedure of structural linguists, therefore, is to compare similar patterns and search for the common underlying arrangements.Another procedur is similar to that used in analysis, phonemes and morphemes. The linguist looks for recurring patterns with animal differences:

You can sharpen the pencil.         Can you sharpen the pencil?

John will wash my car                 will john wash my car?

Ali may see the picture                may ali see the picture?

The above pairs of sentences are differentiated from each other by moving the auxiliary to the front of the sentence and by the change in intonation pattern. From this kind of analysis, the linguist gets his idea about the question pattern in English.

1.      Constituent Analysis

The linguist is interested not only in the sentence pasterns, which really represent the sequence of sentence elements (determiner, noun, verb, etc), but also in the relationship between the elements. Which elements are more closely related to each other than the other elements? In the sentence, the hunter shot the tiger, which of the following ways of grouping the elements (words) is acceptable to a native speaker?

a)      The/ hunter shot the tiger.

b)      The hunter/ shot the tiger

c)        The hunter shot/ the tiger

d)       The hunter shot the/ tiger

A native speaker would intutitively say that the second grouping gives the two main part of the sentence, i.e. the parts that make up the sentence “immediately”. (parts that immediately make up larger parts of a sentence are called immediate constituents. The immediate constituents of the above sentence are the hunter and shot the tiger). The linguist can continue the process of dividing the sentence parts in order to find the groupings acceptable to a native speaker. For example, shot the tiger is divided into the immediate constituents shot and the tiger. This process can be continued until only individual words are left.