Syntax - Morphosyntax: Crash Course Linguistics #3 | Summary and Q&A

TL;DR

Syntax is the study of how languages convey relationships between words through word order and morphemes.

Key Insights

• 🔑 Syntax is fundamental to every language as it conveys relationships between words.
• 🪈 Different languages have different word orders, but as long as the order is consistent within a language, it can convey meaning effectively.
• 👻 Morphemes allow languages to indicate the roles of subjects and objects even when word order is changed.

Transcript

Hi! I'm Taylor and welcome to Crash Course Linguistics! Let's say we have a bag of words and we want to use them to tell a story. This should be simple enough! We pull out some words one at a time, and we get "sees," "Taylor," "rabbit," and "the." Okay, so we have some idea of what's going on, but we're left with an important question: am I stealth... Read More

Questions & Answers

Q: What is syntax and why is it important in language?

Syntax is the study of how languages express relationships between words. It is important because it allows us to convey meaning by organizing words in a particular order.

Q: How do different languages use word order to express relationships between words?

Languages have different word orders, such as subject-verb-object or verb-subject-object, to indicate who did what to whom. For example, English and many other languages use the subject-verb-object order.

Q: How do morphemes contribute to syntax in a language?

Morphemes are small units of meaning that can indicate whether something is a subject or an object. They allow languages to use word order for other purposes, like emphasis or poetic rhyme.

Q: Do signed languages use the same strategies as spoken languages for expressing relationships between words?

Signed languages, like American Sign Language (ASL), use a combination of word order and other strategies, such as spatial reference, to distinguish between subjects and objects. For example, referents can be established in space to convey who did what to whom.

Summary & Key Takeaways

• Syntax is essential for conveying the relationships between words in a sentence, such as subject, verb, and object.

• Word order is one way languages express these relationships, with different languages having different typical word orders.

• Morphemes, the smallest units of meaning, can also indicate the roles of subjects and objects in a sentence.