1. Linguistics The eleventh week

2. Chapter 4 Syntax  4.1 Introduction  4.2 Word Classes

3. Key point  Word Classes

4. Difficult point  Word Classes

5. Introduction  Syntax is a branch of linguistics that studies the sentence structure.  The major distinction between morphology and syntax is that the former is concerned with the internal composition of a word, while the latter is concerned with the combination of words.

6. Word order plays a key role in English and Chinese:  (1) a. The hunter chased the game. b. The game chased the hunter.  (2) 我们在第十三周学习句法学。  Clearly, (1a) and (1b) do not have the same meaning.  In inflectional languages like Russian, word order is not as important.

7. Word Classes  The categories are traditionally called parts of speech, but now they are generally called word classes.

8. Word class  Nouns  Adjectives  Verbs.  Adverbs  Prepositions  pronoun  Conjunctions

9. Sentence of “The hunter fears the cries of the blackbirds”  S → Art., N, Art., N, prep., Art., N.  In English the order “ Art., adv., adj., N ” is acceptable, the order “ adj., Art., adv., N ” is not. The rules which govern the structure of phrases are known as phrase structure rules or rewrite rules. Such rules allow for the generation of grammatical sentences in a language; they constitute a generative grammar for that language.

10. Assignment  Review what have been learned in the class.