Overview

In the previous chapter, we argued that native speakers' competence in their native language(s) is reflected in their intuitions about sentence well-formedness (derived from their acceptability judgments) on the one hand, and their intuitions about sentence-structure on the other. We have argued that the ability to make judgments about well-formedness and structure holds at all four major linguistic levels – Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics. Hence, it follows that a native speaker's syntactic competence will be reflected in his intuitions about the grammaticality (= syntactic well-formedness) of sentences on the one hand, and their syntactic structure on the other. We have discussed in some detail the problems of deciding whether a given sentence is grammatical or not. In this chapter, we examine the question of what it means to say that a sentence has a syntactic structure, we discuss the evidence in support of that claim; and we look at ways of representing syntactic structure.

Intuitions about Structure

Part of the evidence for claiming that sentences have a syntactic structure in language comes from the native speaker's intuitions about the structure of sentences in his language. The structural intuitions which native speakers have about the Syntax of their languages are of two types, namely (i) intuitions about how sound-sequences in sentences are structured into successively larger structural units which we call constituents; and (ii) intuitions about whether particular sets of constituents (i.e. structural units) belong to the same category or not.