Syntactic process

 The syntactic process of a language refers to the way words are arranged and combined to form phrases, clauses, and sentences according to the rules of grammar. It is the mechanism that allows language to create complex and meaningful sentence structures from simple elements. There are some major syntactic processes, and these are given below:

Discontinuous constituents:

Discontinuous constituents are when a phrase or clause is broken up by other words, yet the separated parts still form a single grammatical unit. For example, in the English language, the phrasal verb ‘pulled down’ in the sentence ‘he pulled the thief down’ is a discontinuous constituent separated by the ‘the thief’.

Recursion:

Recursion in syntax is the process by which a grammatical rule can be applied to its own output, allowing structures to be nested inside each other indefinitely. Recursion explains why human language can generate an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of rules and words.

Concatenation:

Concatenation in syntax is the process that places words one after another to build larger structures. For example, in the sentence ‘the boy runs’, we see that the structure is subject ( the boy)+ verb (runs).

Conjoining:

Conjoining or coordination is the process that links two or more units of the same type using conjugations. For example:

the scene of the movie was in Singapore.

The scene of the play was in Singapore.

The two sentences can be turned into a new sentence by the process of conjoining: the scene of the play and the movie was in Dhaka city.

Embedding:

Embedding in syntax occurs when a subordinate clause is embedded within a superordinate or main clause, as in the example: "The boy who spoke to you is my brother."

In this example, the subordinate clause ‘who spoke to you’ is embedded in the superordinate clause’ the boy is my brother’ as is exhibited in the diagram below:

 Transformation/ movement:

Transformation is the changing of the order of words for questions, emphasis, or focus.it is an operation that takes an underlying structure of a sentence and converts it into a different surface structure while preserving meaning. Transformation in sentences, voice change, etc., are processes of transformation in syntax.

Agreement:

Agreement is a syntactic process where certain words change their form to match the grammatical features of other words in the sentence. It is in syntax that focuses on how words must match in number, person, gender, or case.

 For example, ‘she runs every day’ is a correct sentence; but ‘they runs every day’ is wrong because the plural subject ‘they’ requires run.