Syntax

Apa sih Syntax itu???

Hey sobat-sobit yang saya banggakan,,Kalian udah tau belum apa itu syntax?

Pasti teman-teman ada yang belum mengetahui apa itu syntax.

Yuuuk silahkan dibaca apa itu syntax…..

"Syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages. Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis."(Noam Chomsky, 2002:11)

Chomsky mengatakan bahwa syntax adalah mata pelajaran/kuliah tentang prinsip-prinsip dan proses-proses dimana kalimat disusun dalam bahasa tertentu. Penelitian tentang syntax pada bahasa tertentu memiliki tujuannya tersendiri dimana susunan grammar  dapat dilihat sebagai alat untuk menghasilkan sebuah kalimat dalam sebuah bahasa. Pakar lain yang menjelaskan definisi syntax adalah Matthew, dikutip oleh Van Vallin dan LaPolla (1997:1), ia mengatakan:

‘The term ‘syntax’ is from the Ancient Greek syntaxis, a verbal noun which literally means “arrangement” or “setting out together”. Traditionally, it refers to the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence.’

Matthew menjelaskan bahwa istilah syntax diambil dari noun verbal bahasa Yunani kuno yang secara literlek berarti “susunan”. Umumnya, syntax mengacu pada bidang grammar yang menerangkan tentang cara-cara bagaimana kata-kata, dengan ataupun tanpa infleksi, disusun untuk menunjukkan hubungan makna dalam kalimat. Senada dengan penjelasan Matthew, Van Valin (2001:1) mengungkapkan inti tentang syntax itu sendiri sebagai berikut:

‘First and foremost, syntax deals with how sentences are constructed, and users of human language employ a striking variety of possible arrangements of the element in sentences.’

Menurut Van Vallin hal pertama dan paling utama adalah bahwa syntax itu membahas bagaimana kalilmat itu disusun, dan syntax juga membahas bagaimana manusia sebagai umat yang berbahasa menggunakan berbagai variasi tentang susunan-susunan element tersebut dalam kalimat.

In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪnˌtæks/ ) is the set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language, specifically word order. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of such principles and processes. The goal of many syntacticians is to discover the syntactic rules common to all languages.

The rules of grammar do not have to be explicitly understood by the speaker of the language or the listener.

The majority of native speakers of a language will have no formal knowledge of the grammar of a language but are still capable of speaking the language grammatically to a great degree of accuracy. Native speakers of a language assimilate these rules subconsciously while the language is being learned as a child.

The Components of Grammars

The grammar of a language has several components. These can be described as follows:

a) The phonetics that governs the structure of sounds;

b) The morphology that governs the structure of words;

c) The syntax, which governs the structure of sentences

d) The semantics that governs the meanings of words and sentences.

We are concerned here primarily with the syntax of the structure of sentences.

The Representations of Syntax

In Linguistics, the syntax of sentences can be described by different methods, for instance, for the following sentence:

"The boy kicked the ball"

The syntax can be described, by the following methods:

1. A statement of the correct sequence of the parts of speech (or Syntactic Categories):

Subject is followed by verb is followed by object.

In the above example,

subject = "The boy" (article followed by noun)

verb = "kicked"

object = "The ball" (article followed by noun)

 

2. by a series of transformational rules

For example:

Where in the above example,

3. By parsing diagrams

Here, the parts of a sentence are shown in a graphical way that emphasises the hierarchical relationships between the components of a sentence. For example:

.

Where:

Subject = “the boy” (article + noun)

Verb = “kicked”

Object = “the ball” (article + noun)

The above structure is the basic syntactic structure for a sentence in the English language. As more complex sentences are considered, it is easy, by this method, to see how these different structures relate to each other, by further breaking down the branches of the structure. The syntax of the language contains the rules which govern the structure of phrases and how these can be joined together. The structures and associated rules vary from one language to another.

Parsing diagrams are capable of representing not just one particular language’s grammar but are capable of representing any kind of grammar. For instance, they can be used to represent the rules of invented languages such as computer programming languages.

This method of representation is the one that I will use to represent musical structures because of the graphic nature of the representation and the flexibility of the approach. By this method, we can show the types of syntactic structures in music and show how they relate to each other by expending or contracting branches of the structure.

Examples of More Complex Syntactic Structures in language

1. Embedding

It is possible to construct sentences which are more complex than the example above. This is done by embedding further phrases within the basic structure. For example, in the sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball."

"with red shorts" is a prepositional phrase that further describes “the boy” .

This can be represented, within the basic sentence structure, as follows:

.

Here we can see how the Prepositional Phrase (PP) “with red shorts” is embedded within the subject Noun Phrase (NP) so that the subject is subdivided into a Noun Phrase and Prepositional Phrase (PP). The Prepositional Phrase itself contains a further Noun Phrase. The parsing diagram clearly shows the hierarchical relationship between the sentence and its components. There are many other ways of extending this structure by embedding subordinate phrases at different parts of the basic structure.

2. Conjoining.

It is also possible to extend sentences by joining together complete structures or complete and incomplete structures, for example:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball and scored a goal"

The conjunction “and” joins together the complete sentence:

"The boy with red shorts kicked the ball"

and the verb phrase:

“scored a goal"

This could be represented as follows:

We will see later that in music there is also one basic structure that can be extended by embedding and conjoining in similar ways.