Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics

4Syntax Sphere

4.1. Basic syntactic concepts

4.1.1. Delimitation of the field of syntax

Syntax is a key branch of linguistics. It focuses on the scientific study of the structure of the sentence as an independent unit. The word order, the dependency relationships between these words and, in some languages, the relationships of agreement as well as the case marking, are among the points that attract the attention of most of the researchers. The final objective of syntax is to produce a formal description of underlying regularities with regard to sentence organization and to determine the principles that govern the combination and dependency relationships of words and word sequences within the sentence.

Syntax, which is actually at the heart of linguistics, maintains fairly close relationships with the other branches of linguistics, including phonology, morphology and semantics.

With phonology and more particularly with prosody, the relationships are well-known. For example, the syntactic process of emphasis, which manifests itself in the form of dislocation (Yesterday evening, John came to see me), or clefting (It is John who came to see me yesterday evening) is systematically accompanied by a particular intonation (see [NES 07, INK 90] for an introduction to these issues).

Compared to morphology, syntax is distinguished by the fact that it focuses on the relationships between words, whereas morphology focuses on variations of word forms. Note that some linguistic currents ...