It studies how syntax varies between different grammatical structures of the same language or between different languages.
Constituency: Understanding how words are grouped together into phrases and clauses is crucial to syntactic analysis. Constituency refers to the way in which words combine to form larger structures.
Phrase structure rules: Rules for representing the structure of sentences in terms of constituent phrases, and the relationships between constituents.
Grammaticality: The concept of grammaticality refers to what is considered acceptable or correct in a particular language.
Word classes: Different classes of words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs have unique syntactic properties.
Argument structure: This refers to the way in which verbs take arguments, either as complements or as modifiers.
Subordination: The use of clauses to create complex sentences and express relationships between ideas.
Dependency: Dependency is the relationship between words where one is dependent on the other, like a verb that requires an object.
Lexical categories: A lexical category is a group of words that share syntactic properties.
Syntactic relations: Different constituents in a sentence can have different syntactic relationships with each other. For example, a subject is related to a verb in a different way than an object.
Tree diagrams: A visual representation of syntax that enables us to see how words are combined to form phrases and clauses, and how these structures relate to each other.
Universal grammar: The theory that there is a set of innate principles underlying all human language, which enables us to learn language and create novel sentences.
Sentence structure: Sentence structure refers to the way in which words are organized within a sentence, which varies across languages.
Morphosyntax: Morphosyntax is concerned with the way in which grammatical categories like tense, mood, and agreement are expressed in language.
Case marking: Some languages use case marking to indicate the syntactic role of nouns and pronouns in a sentence.
Agreement: Agreement is the way in which the grammatical properties of one word are reflected in another word, such as the agreement of verbs with the subject.
Transitivity: Transitivity is the relationship between a verb and its arguments, and how the verb is marked depending on the number and types of arguments it takes.
Word order: Word order refers to the way in which words are arranged within a sentence. This can vary across languages and is often associated with specific syntactic structures.
Cross-linguistic variation: Despite universal grammar, there can be significant variation in syntactic structures across different languages. Understanding this variation is crucial to syntactic typology.
Syntactic change: Syntactic structures can change over time, either through language contact or through internal processes of language change.
Anaphora: Anaphora is the use of pronouns and other forms to refer back to previously mentioned entities in discourse, and its relation to syntax.
Word order typology: This refers to the different ways that languages order their constituent parts, including subject, verb, and object.
Case marking typology: This is the system that languages use to denote the grammatical roles of nouns and pronouns in sentences, whether through inflection, morphological changes, or word order.
Verb agreement typology: This describes the ways that languages alter the verb form (conjugation) to agree with the noun or pronoun that is the subject or object of the sentence.
Noun class typology: This refers to the system of noun classification, which categorizes nouns into classes based on their semantic and syntactic properties. Some languages use gender, others use animacy, while others use arbitrary classifiers.
Voice typology: This describes the different ways languages express the relationship between the subject and the action, whether through active voice, passive voice, or other constructions.
Negation typology: This concerns the different ways that languages express negation, whether through particles, auxiliary verbs, or negation markers.
Agreement typology: This refers to the mandatory, concord-like agreement that some languages exhibit between the subject, the verb, and other parts of the sentence.
Politeness typology: Some languages distinguish between polite and impolite speech through the use of special verb forms or pronouns.
Subordinate clause typology: This describes the ways that languages form subordinate clauses, especially using subordinating conjunctions.
Serial verb constructions typology: Some languages use a series of verbs together in a single sentence, which results in specific meaning intended, and different ways of conjugation applied based on its uses.