Introducing English Linguistics

What is more
, Cox suggests that support in the South is at best luke-
warm. None the less, the characterization of catholic  – nationalist ide-
ology I have just documented would seem to fly in the face of this sort of
evidence. 
(BNC AO7 657)
Summary
Syntax involves the study of how constituents are grouped and
ordered. Constituents can be identified through a series of tests. In the
sentence The woman wrote lots of letters, The woman is a constituent
because it can be pronominalized (She wrote lots of letters) and moved
when the sentence is converted into the passive voice (Lots of letters were
written by the woman). Constituents can be defined either notionally or
formally. Constituents can also be described in terms of their linear
and hierarchical structure, and the particular form and function that
they have in a clause.
Although syntax is a discrete and separate level of linguistic struc-
ture, the discussion of adverbials at the end of the previous section
indicates that it is often hard to discuss a specific syntactic category
without making reference to the particular meaning that the category
exhibits. The study of meaning is known as semantics, a topic that will
be considered in detail in the next chapter.

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English syntax
147
Further reading
The best way to find information on English syntax is to consult one of the major reference grammars of English:
Quirk et al.’s A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (London: Longman, 1985), or Huddleston
and Pullum’s The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002). Biber et al.’s Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Harlow, England: Pearson Education
Limited, 1999) is corpus-based, and provides both descriptive information about English syntax and the frequen-
cy with which various syntactic constructions occur in registers of spoken and written English.