Basic Concepts
What is syntax?
The study of the rules that govern how words combine to form sentences.
What is a declarative sentence?
A sentence that makes a statement.
What is a simple sentence?
A sentence with one independent clause and no dependent clause.
The part of the sentence that contains known or given information.
Theme
What is a phrase?
A group of words that functions as a single part of speech and does not contain both a subject and a predicate.
What is a sentence?
This is considered the main syntactic unit.
What is an interrogative sentence?
A sentence that asks a question.
What is a compound sentence?
A sentence with two or more independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction.
What is the rheme?
The part of the sentence that introduces new information.
What is a noun phrase?
A phrase headed by a noun and may include determiners, adjectives, or modifiers.
What are the subject and the predicate?
The two main parts of a sentence.
What is an imperative sentence?
A sentence that gives a command.
What is a complex sentence?
A sentence with one independent clause and at least one dependent clause.
What is communicative structure?
This structure explains how information flows in a sentence from old to new.
What is a verb phrase?
A group of words built around a verb that may include auxiliaries, objects, or complements.
What is a word?
The minimal meaningful unit in syntax that cannot be divided further.
What is an exclamatory sentence?
A sentence that expresses strong emotion.
What are subordinating conjunctions?
These words (like "because," "although," "if") introduce dependent clauses.
What is the beginning of the sentence?
The theme usually comes at this position in English sentences.
What is an adverbial phrase?
In the phrase “very quickly,” this is the type of phrase it is.
What is agreement?
The type of syntactic relation where a verb agrees in number with the subject.
What is a compound-complex sentence?
This type of sentence contains at least two independent clauses and one dependent clause.
What is a syntactic tree (or tree diagram)?
The hierarchical arrangement of sentence elements is shown in this kind of structure diagram.
What is a change in emphasis or focus?
This is how the meaning of a sentence can shift when the theme and rheme are rearranged.
What is a syntactic phrase structure?
A group of words where one word is the "head" and the others are its dependents.