Wednesday January 4, 2006
How to treat syntax
I was amused reading Dr Lim Chin Lam’s (Dec 16) assertion that one element – making good sense – seems to be missing in the definition of syntax.
In my opinion, syntax should be treated as how it is originally defined – the study of the rules that govern how words are combined at sentence level – without too much fuss over “good sense”. In other words, the main concern of syntax is that the words are grammatically sequenced or arranged with all their correct derivations and inflections.
Syntax in transformational-generative grammar allows infinite grammatical sentence constructions even though some of them are totally senseless, as in “The colourless green ideas sleep furiously”, or ambiguous, such as “The man hit the lady with the umbrella”.
Therefore, leaving syntax alone, meaning and “sense” should be treated under a different light, or rather two – semantics and pragmatics.
Semantics, as opposed to syntax which explains the formal structure, pertains to what something means and pragmatics refers to generally the study of language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings.
So, even though syntax allows weird comments in people’s heads in the following:
PENANG: A youth was caught filming a girl bathing with his video camera in Teluk Kumbar near Bayan Lepas here.
rest assured that with a little help of semantics and context, meaning and sense will definitely come to light. – Mahid bin Masseluang, Labuan
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