A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

The words of the world want to make sentences.
Gaston Bachelard (1 884-1 962)
PRELIMINARY REMARKS
Consider the following seven arrangements of the same words. All, except for
one, have been strung together in a random fashion:
(1) boy the is eating pizza a
(2) boy pizza the a is eating
(3) boy pizza a the is eating
(4) pizza boy the a is eating
(5) is eating a boy pizza the
(6) a the is eating boy pizza
(7) the boy is eating a pizza
Clearly, only in arrangement (7) have the words not been put together
randomly. It is the only legitimate sentence. The other six are meaningless
strings because, even though they all consist of valid English words, they lack
the appropriate syntactic structure that governs word order in English sentences.
Like the term word, sentence refers to a notion that everyone intuitively knows,
but which defies precise definition. This is why linguists prefer to characterize
a sentence structurally as a string of words organized around a subject and a
predicate. Generally speaking, the subject is what or who the sentence is about;
and the predicate indicates what the subject does, thinks, says, etc., or else
what is said, thought, etc., about the subject. The basic syntactic structure of
an English sentence can thus be shown as follows:
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