Syntactic Knowledge

a. Word Order. As a speaker of English, you know how the parts of a sentence should be arranged. For example, you know that, of the 6 logical possibilities in (12), only 2 are allowed in English:

(12) a. John saw Bill. (SVO)
b. *John Bill saw. (SOV)
c. *Saw Bill John. (VOS)
d. *Saw John Bill. (VSO)
e. *Bill saw John. (OVS)
f. Bill, John saw. (OSV) (with comma after Bill)

If you speak Japanese or Navajo, however, then you know that the orders corresponding to (12b), (12f), are possible, but the others are not. This is illustrated by the Japanese examples below:

(13) a. *John-ga mit-a Bill-o. (SVO)
John-subj see-past Bill-obj
b. John-ga Bill-o mit-a. (SOV)
c. *mit-a John-ga Bill-o. (VSO)
d. *mit-a Bill-o John-ga. (VOS)
e. *Bill-o mit-a John-ga. (OVS)
f. Bill-o John-ga mit-a. (OSV)

Chamorro, Irish and many other languages differ from English and Japanese, etc., in allowing the orders represented by (12a) (SVO order) and (12d) (VSO), and excluding some or all the others. Latin, however, allows all the six logical possibilities:

(14) a. Ami1cus Caecilium salu1tat.
friend Caecilium greets
'The friend greets Caecilius.'
b. Caecilium ami1cus salu1tat.
c. Ami1cus salu1tat Caecilium.
d. Caecilium salu1tat ami1cus.
e. salu1tat ami1cus Caecilium.
f. salu1tat Caecilium ami1cus.

The constraint on word order that is part of your knowledge of English is further illustrated by the examples below:

(15) a. a gray-haired student of physics
b. a physics student with gray hair
c. a gray-haired physics student
d. a student of physics with gray hair
e. *a physics gray-haired student
f. *a student with gray hair of physics

While English is fairly liberal in allowing 4 out of the 6 possibilities in (15), Japanese and Navajo allow only the form corresponding to (15c), rejecting all other word orders.

b. Grammaticality. Your knowledge about whether a given string is a grammatical utterance in your language is not limited to that related to word order, but is manifested in many other ways. For example, regardless of the fact that it "does not make sense", you know that (16a) is grammatical, but (16b)-(16c) are not:

(16) a. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
b. *Sleep colorless furiously ideas green.
c. *Furiously sleep ideas green colorless.

You can make fairly subtle judgments concerning the grammaticality of sentences, regardless of whether they have ever been heard before:

(17) a. ??What book did you wonder why John bought?
b. *Who did you wonder why bought the books?
c. ??This is the book which I wonder why John bought.
d. *This is the person who I wonder why bought the books.

c. Structure and Categories. More importantly, in the area of syntax--the subject matter of this course, anyone having competence in a language can have intuitions about the structure and categories of grammatical sentences of his/her language. They can identify the words in an utterance, but they also can see the sentence as more than merely a linear arrangement of words. Observe the following sentences.

(18) a. John slept.
b. John left home.
c. The boy left home.
d. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
e. The man who was mixing it fell into the cement he was mixing.
f. The quick fox jumps over the brown lazy dog.
g. The old men and women left early yesterday.
h. John talked to the man in blue and the woman in red.

Regardless of the number of words within a grammatical sentence, speakers of English generally have no problem dividing it into two "natural" sub-parts, or immediate constituents (ICs). This is trivially the case with (18a). But speakers also have no problem cutting the sentences (b-h) into two ICs