Syntax - Structure of sentences and words

Students of linguistics often find syntax difficult, so it’s probably a good idea to start here while you’re still fresh! You’ll find that it’s really not that bad and it makes a lot of sense as long as you keep an open mind. It is likely that you never thought about language the way a syntactician does. Your reward after this chapter is that you’ll be able to think about language from a different point of view. Remember that syntacticians are concerned with the way words and sentences are built.

Morphology

Syntax itself is split into two divisions. One is >morphology. Morphology is concerned with the way words are put together. Consider the following Dutch words:

taal language
cursus course
dag day

These are three separate Dutch words with their separate meaning. But we can also put these two words together to form a new word. The resulting word is called a >compound:

taalcursus language course
cursusdag course day (i.e. a day in a course)

Amazingly, we can also put these words together in a different order:

dagcursus day course
cursustaal course language

The first six words are all in the Dutch dictionary (>Dikke Van Dale), but the last one, cursustaal, is not. We just made a new word! This is one of the most striking things of human language. Language is >productive. This means that you can ‘produce’ new words and sentences that didn’t exist before. Even though ‘cursustaal’ is not in the Van Dale it is still a perfectly grammatical word of Dutch and native speakers of Dutch will understand it, even if they have never heard it before!

So what does the word mean? Note that ‘taalcursus’ and ‘dagcursus’ are both types of ‘cursussen’ (courses). ‘Cursustaal’, however, is a type of ‘taal’ (language). We say that the right-hand part of a word in Dutch is its >head. This means that it is the most important part of the word, the one that determines its meaning. Consider the following list of Dutch compounds:

cursustaal course language
spreektaal speaking language
schrijftaal writing language
taalcursus language course
spreekcursus speaking course
schrijfcursus writing course

The first three words are all types of ‘taal’ (language) whereas the last three are all types of ‘cursussen’ (courses). This is because of the >right-headedness of Dutch compounds. The left part of the word tells us exactly what type of ‘taal’ or ‘cursus’ we mean.

Another important fact about language is that the possibilities are infinite (at least in principle). There is no such thing as the ‘longest word’ of a language. Because language allows us to put words together to form new words you can always just add a word to what someone claims is the longest word and you will have made an even longer word! A famous example of the infinite possibilities of morphology is:

raket missile
anti-raket-raket anti-missile-missile
anti-anti-raket-raket-raket anti-anti-missile-missile-missile
etcetera… etcetera...

The only limitation you have in making this word longer is time. As long as you have one more ‘raket’ than you have ‘anti’ this is a grammatical, if somewhat odd, word. This is another part of the productivity of language.

Syntax

It isn’t just morphology that is productive. Syntax, the way words are put together in a sentence, is also crucially productive. Most of the sentences you say are new sentences that you’ve never said or heard before. Just as with words, sentences too can be infinitely long. A good theory of grammar will account for this infiniteness and productivity without allowing for words and sentences that do not occur in the language (without allowing >ungrammatical structures). Syntacticians try to find the exact set of rules that allows all the grammatical structures while excluding the ungrammatical ones. You can compare this to the rules in maths which explain how certain calculations work.

In order to find these rules syntacticians have been investigating regularities in language. There is a remarkable similarity between languages in the types of words and word order they have. For example, all sentences in all languages have >verbs and all must have (some form of) >subject. A basic assumption is that words can be divided into different >word classes. It is important that you know these word classes. There are five major word classes in the following sentence:

The five major word classes are:

*Determiner	- D		het huis	(the house)
*Adjective	- A		het mooie huis	(the beautiful house)
*Noun	- N		het huis
*Verb	- V		ik loop	(I walk)
*Preposition	- P		onder de kast	(under the closet)

The >articles ‘de/het’ (the) are a type of determiner. The term ‘article’ is used more often than determiner in language courses. In most language courses, including Dutch language courses, the Latin terms for the word classes are used which is lucky if you’re a native speaker of English (because they are very similar to the English words). However, it might still be useful to know the Dutch terminology:

article artikel het lidwoord

adjective adjectief het bijvoeglijk naamwoord

noun Nomen het zelfstandig naamwoord

verb Verbum het werkwoord

preposition prepositie het voorzetsel

Now that you know the terms used to describe the >type of words used in a sentence, we can look at the >function they have in a sentence. In the sentence:

Jan leest de tekst.

Jan reads the text.

there is a Verb ‘lezen’ (to read), a Noun ‘Jan’ and an Article/Noun combination ‘de tekst’. The >verb is the word that tells you what someone or something is doing. It is the ‘action’ word, although it does not necessarily have to be something very active, as you can see in the following list of verbs:

zien to see

denken to think

schijnen to seem

zitten to sit

In the sentence ‘Jan leest de tekst’ there is someone who is doing the reading (Jan). This is called the >subject. Almost all sentences have subjects. A *subject is the person, thing or idea which performs the ‘action’ in a sentence (>TYDG). In this sentence ‘Jan’ is doing the reading, so it is the subject of the sentence.

Most sentences also have a person, thing or idea which is at the receiving end of the action in the sentence. This is called the >object. In this sentence it is ‘de tekst’ which is being read, so this is the *object of the sentence. Not all sentences need an object, this depends on the verb:

Ik zie de zin I see the sentence

Ik zie I see

Ik sla de syntacticus I hit the syntactician

* Ik sla * I hit

An asterisk ( * ) in front of a sentence means it is ungrammatical (and a ? in front of a sentence means that it is dubious or that people don’t agree that it is grammatical). You can’t just hit, you have to hit something. The verb ‘slaan’ (hit) needs an object; we call it a >transitive verb. Verbs that do not need objects are called >intransitive.

Different languages have different ways of showing the relationship of subject, verb and object in a sentence. Dutch (and English) use(s) >word order. This means that you can tell from the word order who is doing what to whom. This becomes clear if you compare the following sentences:

Guus vindt Klazina leuk.
Guus finds Klazina nice. (Guus likes Klazina) subject: Guus
Klazina vindt Guus leuk.
Klazina finds Guus nice. (Klazina likes Guus) subject: Klazina

If you change the word order around, the sentence means something else all of a sudden. (Languages that depend on word order are known as >configurational languages. Another way of indicating the relationship between words is the use of >inflections, as in Latin:

Magna aranea perterruit Matildam amitam.
Large spider frightened Matilda aunt
Magna Matildam perterruit amitam aranea.
Large Matilda frightened Aunt spider

‘The large spider frightened Aunt Matilda’ (example from >TYL)

The order of the words does not matter to the meaning or the structure of the sentences. Languages like Latin are called >non-configurational).

Congratulations! You’ve worked yourself through the basics of this course. You’ll be picking up more linguistic terminology as you go along, but for now you’re ready for some serious Dutch linguistics! Take a minute to celebrate your victory and then click next to find out more about Dutch word order. It will not only help you with your Dutch, it will also show you that all the things you just learned are pretty handy!

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(word order)