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QUESTION 1 - DO WE REALLY NEED THIS SYNTAX?
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Date: October 07, 2014
Q1: ". . . do we really need this syntax? I believe syntax is a useful reference-instrument to
the ESL students. To us
however, it seems more like an extra-burden to learn syntax in addition
to morphology.
I can't understand why morphology shouldn't be perfectly
sufficient . . ."
From: D H T - Dallas, Texas, USA
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A1:
Morphology studies the "forms" of the words, and also "(local)
structures" of words. Sentence Syntax analyses the "functions" of the words,
though only within the restrictive syntactic sentence frame. It should be clear
that Morphology and Sentence Syntax complement each other. Let's see a
practical example.
Oh, how nice of you!
There is no sentence above, therefore we cannot perform a syntactical
analysis; however, we can perform a morphologic analysis. On the other
hand, when previous expression becomes:
Oh, it
is so nice
of you!
or
Oh, it is so nice
of you to come!
Grammatical function of the morphologic pronoun "of you"
cannot be evaluated correctly without knowing its corresponding syntactic function.
Grammar helps a lot ESL students, and the native ones as well. It
happens in English (same as in any other language) that words have
"grammatical meanings", "grammatical forms", and "grammatical
functions". Therefore, the people to master such complex grammatical
aspects are the ones to write our Laws, the contracts we work with, good
books or, to a lesser level, even the very good resumes!
Considering the other side, without grammar we have no good Laws, no
beneficial contracts, no good books and, naturally, not sufficiently
good Resumes, so . . .
Fact is, a good command of grammar is a must today, anywhere on the Planet.
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