Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Lecture 9 
What is syntax? Sentence, as the main unit of syntax.
Word-groups. Syntactic bonds between words. 
In the first lecture of our course we mentioned, that when you know a language, you can 
speak and be understood by others who know the same language; that knowledge of a language 
enables you to combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences. But not every 
string of words constitutes a well-formed sentence in a language. Therefore, in addition to 
knowing the words of the language, linguistic knowledge includes rules for combining words to 
form sentences and make your own judgments. These rules must be limited (finite) in length 
and number so that they can be stored in our brains. Yet, they must permit us to form and 
understand an infinite set of new sentences (Fromkin et al. 2003: 11). Our ability to speak and 
understand, and to make judgments about the well-formedness of sentences, reveals our 
knowledge of the grammar of our language. 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof. 
Nino Kirvalidze
59
We have also discussed the notion of “Grammar” and indicated that this term
derives from 
Greek (it means “art of letters” as in Greek 
gramma
= 
letter
) and it refers to the study of 
morphology (i.e. the rules of word formation, parts of speech and their grammatical categories) 
and syntax (i.e. the rules of sentence formation). Hence, syntax is a branch of grammar that 
studies sentence construction, its communicative-functional, structural and pragmatic classifi-
cations as well as its informative organization via “functional sentence perspective” theory. 
Therefore a sentence is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory. 
What is a sentence? When we speak or write, we convey our thoughts through sentences. 
A sentence is the smallest lingual unit which is capable of performing a communication, 
containing some kind of information. With the help of a sentence we can make a statement 
(“London is the capital of the UK.”), command or request (“Wash your hands before eating.”) or 
ask a question (“Have you ever been to Paris?”).
In written language a sentence is a string of words standing between an initial capital let-
ter and the mark of punctuation at the end while in spoken language a sentence is marked by s 
special intonation (Fromkin et al. 2003; Talerman 1998). The role of intonation as a delimiting 
factor is especially important for sentences which have more than one predicative centre, in