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

86 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL, LINGUISTICS
Sentence
Subject Predicate
The boy is eating the pizza
All languages use word order of some sort to make sentences. In some
languages, however, it is less crucial than it is in others. As mentioned, Latin,
for example, allowed more variation in word order than English does. The
Latin sentences Johannes videt Marcurn and Marcurn videt Johannes both
meant “John sees Mark.” Morphological elements in the two sentences indicate
the relationship of the words to one another-Johannes (“John”) is the subject
of the sentence, no matter where it occurs in it, because it ends in -s (not
-urn); Marcurn (“Mark”) is the object of the sentence, no matter where it is
placed in it, because it ends in -urn (not -s). The purpose of ths chapter is to
discuss the role of syntactic structure in language and its relation to theories of
language in general.
SENTENCES
A general characteristic of sentences is that they have a hierarchical or
“clustering” structure. This means that the morphemes in them are not organized
as singular elements in a line, but rather in terms of how they cluster with each
other as manifestations of the subject-predicate relation and, more specifically,
as manifestations of certain types of phrases and word classes. The hierarchical
relations that conjoin the boy, is eating, and apizza as distinct clusters in the
above sentence are shown below:
Subject
I
Noun Phrase
Predicate
I
Verb Phrase
A
Verb Noun Phrase
I I
The boy is eating apizza