Introduction

Syntax is of interest (as is morphology too) because without syntax human beings would be unable to construct complex messages conveying information about complex situations, proposals or ideas. We touched on the relationship between grammar and semantics on word classes; it turned out that the differences between the major classes of words are central to the use of language. It was not so much the contrast between reference to people, places and things and reference to actions and states as the acts that speakers carry out with different classes of words – referring, predicating and modifying.

One set of criteria for recognizing word classes has to do with morphosyntactic properties; in many languages, nouns have suffixes that signal case, while verbs have suffixes that signal person and number (as described on the lexicon and on syntactic linkage). In many languages, verbs also have suffixes that signal other information that is semantically central. The verb suffixes of Latin, for example, carry information about tense, aspect, mood and voice, ‘grammatical categories’ which we are about to introduce.

As we saw when we explored word classes in Chapter 4, many languages have a much richer system of noun and verb suffixes (inflectional morphology) than English, whose inflectional morphology is pretty sparse. Much of the work that is done by suffixes in Latin, say, is done by syntactic constructions in English and falls into the scope of this book on two counts, being syntactic and being central to the connections between grammar and meaning.