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What is a sentence analysis?
What is a language analysis?
What is grammatical analysis?
How do we understand grammatical structure in real-world language?
When we turn to examine real-world language, as opposed to the deliberately controlled sentences of grammar books, we must understand the principles that underlie grammatical structure and apply our knowledge.
We determine whether words or phrases have relationships with other words or phrases in a sentence and how that affects their placement or their morphological form. We look for similarities and differences in phrase and sentence structure across languages.
- Language features. When analysing language you must show that you are aware of how it is written. This means identifying the language features used, and explaining their effect.
- Alliteration. This is where consecutive words begin with the same letter and, more importantly, the same sound. An example is The rifles rapid rattle. The repetition of the 'r' sound echoes the sound of machine guns being fired.
- Allusion. An allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, historical event or another literary work. For example, if you call someone who helps others a Good Samiritan you are alluding to the Parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible.
- Hyperbole. Hyperbole is the deliberate use of exaggeration to emphasise a point. For example I'm giving it two hundred per cent obviously isn't possible but the fact that it is impossible emphasises how much effort someone is willing to make.
The purpose of discourse analysis is to investigate the functions of language (i.e., what language is used for) and how meaning is constructed in different contexts, which, to recap, include the social, cultural, political, and historical backgrounds of the discourse.
- Constituent Definition
- Immediate Constituent Analysis
- The Substitution Test
- Sources
Every sentence (and every phrase and clause) has constituents. That is to say, every sentence is made up of parts of other things that work together to make the sentence meaningful. For example, in the sentence: "My dog Aristotle bit the postal carrier on the ankle," the constituent parts are the subject, made up of a Noun Phrase ("my dog Aristotle...
One method of analyzing sentences, commonly known as immediate constituent analysis (or IC analysis), was introduced by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield. As Bloomfield identified it, IC analysis involves breaking a sentence down into its parts and illustrating it with brackets or a tree diagram. Though originally associated with structural ...
So far, the sentences have been fairly straightforward. In the sentence "Edward grows tomatoes as large as grapefruit," the constituent parts are the subject (that would be Edward) and the predicate ("grows tomatoes"); another constituent is the phrase "as large as grapefruit," a noun phrase that modifies the noun of the predicate. In constituent a...
Bloomfield, Leonard. "Language," 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.Crystal, David. "A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics," 6th ed. Blackwell, 2008.Klammer, Thomas P., Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe. "Analyzing English Grammar," 4th ed. Pearson, 2004.Klinge, Alex. "Mastering English." Walter de Gruyter, 1998a language, we learn the conventions about what is called a word, and about spacing these elements in texts. Who decides these conventions, and how do we learn them? We will gradually get to some surprising perspectives on this question. 1
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The goal of this chapter is to answer the following questions: How can we use a formal grammar to describe the structure of an unlimited set of sentences? How do we represent the structure of sentences using syntax trees? How do parsers analyze a sentence and automatically build a syntax tree?
