Getting to Know Syntax for Beginners

Getting to Know Syntax for Beginners

    When we are talking about language, especially English, then syntax must be one of the subjects which couldn’t be ignored. Syntax takes one important role in creating conversation, dialogues, also writing materials. Raymond Hickey released his book, called The Neat Summary of Linguistics which consists of 40 pages and covered up the branches of pure linguistics.

Hickey is also a linguist and a reader of Chomsky’s writings. He reffered some of the material he had on his book from Chomsky’s explanation in his books (1957-1980’s). Hickey stated that it’s important to analyse the internal structure of sentences as the consent of his writing are    

1) to reveal the hierarchy in the ordering of elements

2) to explain how surface ambiguities come about

3) to demonstrate the relatedness of certain sentences

    To reach those three aims he has above, the author stated a few requirements to be filled by every language learners, such as phrasing structurized grammar. As in informal speech, it might be okay not to use grammatically correct words or saying. But when it comes to writng, then it will be necassary to be done. Since it’ll be easier to be understood. Raymond Hickey showed the chart of formulas to English syntax followed by a brief explanation under.

    Hickey also brought up Deep and Surface structure in his explanation. We could quote his saying “To indicate the nature of the structure which sentences have but which is  not evident from their spoken form one uses the term   deep   structure and   surface   structure. The term surface structure has an obvious meaning. This is the actual form which a sentence has when spoken. The deep structure on the other hand is a model of the structure necessary to account for the meaning of a sentence. As mentioned above this might correspond to a map of a real but unobservable mental structure, however there is no direct proof of this.”

     The weakness of Hickey’s work is that he came up with great ideas in hiw writing unfortunately to this review we could not really his best effort to elaborate those brilliant ideas clearly so they seem to be stuck nowhere without further explanation. Had he explained them more then it could be guaranteed that his writing could be used as one of the most popular refferance in the near future.

However, Hickey’s work could be one of your handout to your students or fellow linguists when you need to explain what shall we learn in linguistics. His works actually could overcome some questions that usually comes up in the process of learning linguistics itself.