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Part I

Syntax句法学: It is a branch of linguistics hat studies how words are combined to from sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.

Syntactic Category: 句法范畴It refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb. 能在句子起相同作用的词构成相同的句法范畴。句法范畴不同于词类，两个不同词类的句可能属于同一句法范畴。

Phrase: (短语) ：Syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrases, the category of which is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built. 英语句法研究中，最常见的是名词短语（NP）、动词短语（VP）、形容词短语（AP）、和介词短语 (PP)

Phrase that are formed of more than one word usually contain the following elements : head (中心语) , specifier （标志语）, and complement（补足语）

Phrase structure rule (短语结构规则)： The special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up a phrase.

Transformation-generative grammar (转换生成语法)：又美国语言学家乔姆斯基在1957年提出的语法研究模式，认为所以的语言形式都是由人脑中的一些深层结构通过一系列的转换规则衍生而来的。其主要内容是短语结构规则和转换规则。 短语结构规则描述了句子和短语的内部构成，描述了合乎句法的句子和短语，但是要清晰地说明句子和句子之间的关系以及可能产生的句法变化，都还需要借助语转化规则。

Deep structure: 深层结构： It is formed by the XP rule in accordance with the head’s subcategorization properties.

Surface structure (表层结构)：It corresponds to the final syntactic form of the sentence which results from appropriate transformations.

系统功能语法：由英国语言学家 M.A.K Halliday 发展出的一套语法体系。主要关注语言和社会之间的关系，认为语言是一种做事的方式，研究语言与环境的关系，重视对个别语言以及个别变体的描述。

PART II

1.What is syntax?

“Syntax” is the study of the rules governing the ways in which words, word groups and phrases are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between sentential elements.

2.What is a sentence?
L. Bloomfield defines “sentence” as an independent linguistic form not included by some grammatical marks in any other linguistic from, i. e., it is not subordinated to a larger linguistic form, it is a structurally independent linguistic form. It is also called a maximum free form.

3.What are syntactic relations?
“Syntactic relations” refer to the ways in which words, word groups or phrases form sentences; hence three kinds of syntactic relations: positional relations, relations of substitutability and relations of co-occurrence.

“Positional relation”, or “word order”, refers to the sequential arrangement to words in a language. It is a manifestation of a certain aspect of what F. de Saussure called “syntagmatic relations”, or of what other linguists call “horizontal relations” or “chain relations”.

“Relations of substitutability” refer to classes or sets of words substitutable for each other grammatically in same sentence structures. Saussure called them “associative relations”. Other people call them “paradigmatic/vertical/choice relations”.

By “relations of co-occurrence”, one means that words of different sets of clauses may permit or require the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations and partly to paradigmatic relations.

4.What is IC analysis? What are immediate constituents(and ultimate constituents)?
“IC analysis” is a new approach of sentence study that cuts a sentence into two(or more) segments. This kind of pure segmentation is simply dividing a sentence into its constituent elements without even knowing what they really are . What remain of the first cut are called “immediate constituents”, and what are left at the final cut are called “ultimate constituents”. For example, “John left yesterday” can be thus segmented: “John| left | | yesterday”. We get two immediate constituents for the first cut (|), and they are “John” and “left yesterday”. Further split(||) this sentence generates three “ultimate constituents”: “John”, “left ” and “yesterday”.

5.What are endocentric and exocentric constructions?
“Endocentric construction” is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i. e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable “centre” or “head”. Usually noun phrases, verb phrases and adjective phrases belong to endocentric types because the constituent items are subordinate to the head. “Exocentric construction”, opposite of endocentric construction, refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as whole ;that is to say ,there is no definable centre or head inside the group. Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate(verb+object) construction, and connective(be+complement) construction.

6.What is a subject? A predicate? An object?
In some language, an “subject” refers to one of the nouns in the nominative case, such as “pater” in the following example: “pater filium amat” (put literally in English: the father the son loves). In English, a “grammatical subject” refers to a noun which can establish correspondence with the verb and which can be checked by a tag-question test, e.g., “He is a good cook(, isn’t he?).”

A “predicate” refers to a major constituent of sentence structure in a binary analysis in which all obligatory constituents other than the subject are considered together. e.g., in the sentence “The monkey is jumping ”, “is jumping ” is the predicate.

Traditionally “object” refers to the receiver or goal of an action, and it is further classified into two kinds: direct object and indirect object. In some inflecting languages, an object is marked by case labels: the “accusative case” for direct object, and the “dative case ” for direct object, and the “dative case” for indirect to word order(after the verb and preposition) and by inflections(of pronouns). E .g., in the sentence “John kissed me”, “me” is the object. Modern linguists suggest that an object refers to such an item that it can become a subject in passive transformation.

7.What is category?
The term “category” in some approaches refers to classes and functions in its narrow sense, e.g., noun, verb, subject, predicate, noun phrase, verb phrase, etc. More specifically it refers to the defining properties of these general units: the categories of the noun, for example, include number, gender, case and countability ; and of the verb, for example, tense, aspect, voice, etc.

8.What is number? What is gender? What is case?
“Number” is a grammatical category used for the analysis of word classes displaying such contrasts as singular, dual, plural, etc. In English, number is mainly observed in nouns, and there are only two forms: singular and plural. Number is also reflected in the inflections of pronouns and verbs.

“Gender” displays such contrasts as “masculine”, “feminine”, “neuter”, or “animate” and “inanimate”, etc., for the analysis of word classes. When word items refer to the sex of the real-world entities, we natural gender(the opposite is grammatical gender).

“Case” identifies the syntactic relationship between words in a sentence. In Latin grammar, cases are based on variations in the morphological forms of the word, and are given the terms “accusative”, “nominative”, “dative”, etc. In English, the case category is realized in three ways: by following a preposition and by word order.

9.What is concord? What is government?
“Concord ” may be defined as requirement that the forms of two or more words of specific word classes that stand in specific syntactic relationship with one another shall be characterized by the same paradigmatically marked category or categories, e.g., “man runs”, “men run”. “Government” requires that one word of a particular class in a given syntactic class shall exhibit the form of a specific category. In English, government applies only to pronouns among the variable words ,that is , prepositions and verbs govern particular forms of the paradigms of pronouns according to their syntactic relation with them, e.g. , “I helped him; he helped me.”

10. What is a phrase? What is a clause?
A “phrase” is a single element of structure containing more than one word, and lacking the subject-predicate structure typical of “clauses”. Traditionally, it is seen as part of a structural hierachy, falling between a clause and word, e.g., “the three tallest girls” (nominal phrase). There is now a tendency to make a distinction between word groups and phrases. A “word group” is an extension of a word of a particular class by way of modification with its main features of the class unchanged. Thus we have nominal group, verbal group, adverbial group, conjunction group and preposition group.

A “clause” is group of words with its own subject and predicate included in a larger subject-verb construction, namely, in a sentence. Clauses can also be classified into two kinds: finite and non-finite clauses, the latter referring to what are traditionally called infinitive phrase, participle phrase and gerundial phrase. (For “sentence”, see I.51.)

11. What is conjoining? What is embedding? What is recursiveness?
“Conjoining” refers to a construction where one clause is co-ordinated or conjoined with another, e. g., “John bought a cat and his wife killed her.” “Embedding” refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (or main clause) in syntactic subordination, e.g., “I saw the man who had killed a chimpanzee.” By “recursiveness” we mean that there is theoretically no limit to the number of the embedded clauses in a complex sentence. This is true also with nominal and adverbial clauses, e.g., “I saw the man who killed a cat who…a rat which…that…”

12.What is hypotactic relation? What is paratactic relation?
“Hypotactic relation” refers to a construction where constituents are linked by means of conjunction, e.g. “He bought eggs and milk.” “Paratactic relation” refers to constructions which are connected by juxtaposition, punctuation or intonation, e. g., “He bought tea, coffee, eggs and milk” (pay attention to the first three nouns connected without “and”).