morphlogy and syntax

[tharwiba]

Introduction II: Morphology and syntax

• There are two branches to grammar, whether Latin or English. Morphology is the grammar of single words and their , the different endings particular kinds of word can take and what they mean. Syntax is the grammar of words in combinations: how they fit together into sentences, and the different grammatical constructions or rules of combination that apply.
• To illustrate the difference, here are some sample recent sentences by a beginning speaker of English, coming to the subject with no previous language, unless you count goos and gurgles: a two-year-old we'll call Georgia, as that's her name.
  1. Somebody taked my shoe off.
     Mature speakers of English will recognise a quite sophisticated morphological error here. Georgia knows that you conjugate the past tense of regular verbs by sticking a -d on the end. What she doesn't yet know is that the verb to take doesn't belong to that regular conjugation, and that you have to learn a different stem for the past tense took.
  2. Where chocolate biscuit?
     This is quite an early sentence, and you can see there's something missing from the syntax: the sentence has no verb. Georgia's omitted the verb to be, which Latin actually allows you to do and still call the sentence grammatical, because as you can see here the sentence is pretty readily intelligible without it, and when you see a sentence with a missing verb it's the usual verb you supply. She's also omitted the article the, which again is a perfectly good Latin habit; Latin doesn't even bother with words for a or the. Of course, the real reason Georgia has omitted the verb is that verbs are the hardest parts of speech to master grammatically, as the following example shows.
  3. What does that says?
     This is a very interesting error that combines morphology and syntax. It fortunately can't be replicated in Latin, and illustrates the comparative simplicity of Latin in contrast to English. Georgia knows that you form the third person singular by sticking an -s on to the stem. What she doesn't yet know is that you take it off again when you invert the sentence in a question. Note how matters are complicated by the fact that English has these confusing little auxiliaries like does, and that their arrival in the sentence can actually affect the ending you stick on the verb. The good news is that Latin doesn't really use this combination of inflections and auxiliaries; it sticks everything on the end where you'd expect to find it.
• These examples show that even in English endings can be quite complex and confusing things, and that the first step to fluency is learning to recognise and use the different inflected forms of words: what in Latin, though not in English, we can sum up as their endings. What we're going to do in the rest of this guide is to run through the forms of Latin endings and the way they're used.