An Introduction to

Linguistic Analysis:
Syntax, Semantics,
and Pragmatics

Subject: introduction to linguistics

By kaouthar soussi
“GROUP 3”

Table of contents:
Chapter 1: Syntax
_Statement Structure.
_ Types of Syntactic Analyss.
_Immediate Constituent Analysis.
_Phrase Structure Grammar.

Chapter 2: Semantics
Truth _Conditional Semantic.
_Semantic Relations.
_Argument Structure.
_Semantic Ambiguity,
_Figurative Language and Metaphor.

Chapter 3:Pragmatics
_ Cooperative Principle and implicator.
_Speech Acts :Locationary, Illocationary, and Prelocationary Acts.
_Politeness and Face-Saving Strategies.

_Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatics.

Chapter 1: Syntax
1 Sentence structure:

Syntactic structure refers to how sentence constituents internally organize and function in terms of
pre-defined grammatical structures. Sentences are built with constituents like noun phrases (NP),
verb phrases (VP), and prepositional phrases (PP) that function as one item in the sentence.
Constituents are built based on rules of phrase structure, e.g., "S → NP + VP", describing how
sentences are constructed hierarchically. This can be represented using tree diagrams to understand
how things are organized. Interestingly, syntactic organization varies between languages. As an
example, English and French typically follow the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order, while
Moroccan Arabic tends to have freer word orders, especially in its use of affixes and clitics. French
adjectives follow the noun ("une voiture rouge"), whereas in English, adjectives precede it ("a red
car"). By way of contrast, Moroccan Arabic uses the verb-subject-object word order in most cases
("ktbat l-bnt r-rissala" – "wrote the letter the girl"). Such cross-linguistic differences illustrate the way
syntax is rule-bound and language-specific. An example of this contrast is the use of subjects: in
English, the subject must be explicit ("She sings"), whereas in Moroccan Arabic, the subject may be
omitted if already shown by the verb form ("katghanni" – "she sings"). Such comparisons allow us to
discover the special syntactic rules by which different languages form sentences.

2 Types of syntactic analysis:

Here, we will be talking about three large types of syntactic analysis: traditional grammar,
structuralist grammar, and generative grammar, which evolves in several stages: Phrase Structure
Grammar, Standard Theory, Extended Standard Theory, and Government-Binding Theory. It should
be noted that every step of generative grammar is an improvement on the previous one. Moreover,
all these syntactic models have been extensively tested on a wide range of languages. This testing
procedure normally shows deficits in a given framework, and therefore the improvement goes on
through intensive research. Syntactic study, like in most other areas of linguistics, is a broad and
constantly developing field.

3 Immediate Constituent Analysis:

Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) is a syntactic theory that emerged as a powerful alternative to
traditional grammar. ICA, developed by American linguist Bloomfield and his followers from the early
1930s to the late 1950s, relies on structural linguistics. ICA treats language as a structure with
phonemes in phonology and morphemes in morphology as form units, not meaning. Structuralist
linguistics, influenced by the scientific and objectivist tendencies of the time, was concerned with
segmentation and classification of language data and paid less attention to abstract concepts and
semantic analysis.
Practically, ICA involves the decomposition of sentences into their immediate constituents in a binary
process. Sentences are split into two constituents, and they are further subdivided if necessary, until
one gets the minimum meaningful units—typically words or morphemes. This method of syntactic
analysis is interested in the recognition of the parts of a sentence in a systematic way, the following
are examples of ICA.
Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) represents sentence structure by methods like tree diagrams
and bracketing. Tree diagrams are the more pervasive of the two because they explicitly delineate
the hierarchical nature of sentence structure. ICA involves the breakdown of sentences into
immediate, intermediate, and ultimate constituents, where immediate constituents are results of the
original binary split, intermediate constituents are those which might be further broken down, and
ultimate constituents are the smallest possible units (most often words or morphemes). In ICA,
sentence segmentation demonstrates that a sentence, despite its linear shape, is a hierarchically
organized cluster of words and larger constituents. For example, in the sentence "asked two
questions," "asked" and "two questions" are immediate constituents, but "asked" and "two" are not.
The constituents can be divided further until the smallest ones are reached. ICA segmentation is
based on the process of expansion. There are two types of expansion: endocentric and exocentric.
Endocentric expansion is identified by the head of a phrase, in which the expansion of the phrase
occurs in a way that has the same distribution as the head. For instance, in "the nice women,"
"women" is the head, and the entire phrase is an endocentric expansion. On the other hand,
exocentric expansion does not depend on a head and involves phrases where the constituents do not
share an element. One key feature in ICA is its use of binary division, with exceptions of course. For
example, sentences with conjunctions "and" or "or" are split into three constituents instead of two
because the conjunction is part of neither of the immediate constituents. ICA is helpful because it
provides the concrete, nuts-and-bolts analysis of language structure. It is also responsible for
structural ambiguities, where sentences or phrases are susceptible to more than one analysis based
on their structure rather than the meaning of specific words. For instance, the sentence "intelligent
boys and girls" can be interpreted either as "intelligent boys and intelligent girls" or "intelligent boys
and girls in general." ICA can account for such ambiguities by revealing how different constituent
groupings give rise to different meanings.
The following sentence exhibits a final type of structural ambiguity which can be

handled within the framework of ICA:

(44) What worries me is being ignored by everyone.

This sentence is ambiguous because it may be interpreted in more than one way:

(45) a. I am worried about being ignored by everyone.

b. Everyone is ignoring the thing that worries

Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) is a shift from the mechanistic to the mentalistic approach to
language in Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA). PSG, developed by Noam Chomsky around 1955
and widely popular by 1957 with his publication Syntactic Structures, takes a lead from ICA but offers
a fundamentally different approach. While ICA deals with the segmentation of sentences, PSG deals
with generating an infinite range of sentences from a finite rule system and hence is the first
generative grammar.

The term "generative" is employed to explain the grammar's ability to generate an infinite number of
sentences from a finite rule system, echoing the process of a child acquiring a language. By the age of
five, children have inadvertently learned a set of rules for the phonological, morphological, syntactic,
and semantic aspects of their native language that allows them to generate and understand
sentences they have never heard before. This shifts language acquisition from the domain of simple
memorization to one of internalization of rules. PSG pays close attention to the participation of the
human mind in language acquisition and use, making abstract properties of language, such as syntax
and semantics, just as important as physical properties. PSG is also an explicit grammar because it
attempts to render the syntactic rules of a language that are internally acquired during language
development overt.

Chomsky also distinguishes between competence and performance in PSG. Competence refers to the
abstract knowledge of language a person has by the time they are five years old, and performance
refers to the actual use of language in real-life situations. Competence is so thorough that people are
potentially able to construct extremely complex and lengthy sentences, but performance limitations,
such as fatigue or boredom, work to suppress this function. This capacity for generating complex
sentences is general and is associated with the distinctly human capacity for language processing and
production.

Chapter 2 : Semantics
1. Truth-Conditional Semantics

Truth-conditional semantics is a theory of meaning in linguistics that states the meaning of a

This approach assumes that understanding the meaning of a sentence is a matter of understanding
what the world would be like should the sentence be true. It isn't concerned with whether or not the
sentence turns out to be true — it's only concerned with the facts that the sentence must be based
on in order to be true. This is applied not only to individual words, but sentence structures as a
whole.

This theory forms the basis of compositional semantics, in which meaning is composed from the
meanings of the components and the combinations in use.
Look at the sentence: "Snow is white."

In truth-conditional semantics, this sentence is true just in case the snow is indeed white in the
world. We might never have encountered snow, and yet we understand the conditions on verifying
its truth.

Another example: "All cats are mammals."

This is true if, actually, the class of all cats is fully included within the class of all mammals — a formal
logical connection.

2. Semantic Relations

Semantic relations define the manner in which words and meanings are related in a language. They
give the internal organization of the mental lexicon.

There are several significant categories of semantic relations:

Synonymy: Equivalent meaning words (couch and sofa).

Antonymy: Opposites, which take a variety of forms:

Complementary antonyms (alive/dead),

Gradable antonyms (hot/cold),

Relational antonyms (buy/sell).

Hyponymy: A word's sense is a more specialized case of another (rose is a hyponym of flower).

Polysemy: One word with several related meanings (e.g., paper as material and paper as article).

Homophony: Words which are pronounced alike but have distinct unrelated meanings (e.g., bat the
animal and bat in baseball).

Example:

In the sentence "A daisy is a flower," daisy is a hyponym of flower, and flower is a hypernym of daisy.
Comprehension of these relations facilitates language users to categorize and deal with meanings
effectively.

3. Argument Structure
Argument structure is the organization of arguments (noun phrases) a verb requires to form a
grammatical and meaningful sentence.

All verbs choose a number and a type of arguments. They are:

intransitive verbs: Need just one argument (subject).

e.g., "She sleeps."

Transitive verbs: Need a subject and an object.

e.g., "He reads a book."

Ditransitive verbs: Take three arguments — subject, direct object, and indirect object.

e.g., "She gave him a gift."

This construction is crucial in determining grammaticality and semantic roles like agent (doer), theme
(one affected), experiencer, goal, etc.

Example:

Consider the verb put in the sentence:

"He put the book on the table."

This verb requires three arguments:

1. He — the agent (one who does the action),

2. the book — the theme (one that gets moved),

3. on the table — the goal or location (where it is placed).

If we leave one out — "He put the book" — the sentence is not grammatical, which shows that put
has a fixed argument structure.

4. Semantic Ambiguity

Semantic ambiguity happens when a sentence or word has more than one meaning because there
are multiple possible meanings or structures.

There are two general types:

e.g., "bat" can be a flying mammal or a sports equipment.

Structural (syntactic) ambiguity: Structure of a sentence allows more than one interpretation.

e.g., "She saw the man with the telescope."

→ Who owns the telescope: the woman or the man?

Semantic vagueness is essential to understand how context enables disambiguation, and it is an issue
for both human and machine language understanding.

Example:

"The chicken is ready to eat."

One interpretation: The chicken is cooked and ready to be eaten (theme).

Another: The chicken is going to eat something (agent).

5. Figurative Language and Metaphor

Figurative language uses language that is not literal, and metaphor is a powerful tool within it, in
which one concept is understood in terms of another.

Metaphors are not just literary tools — they shape the way we think and speak. We often speak
metaphorically without even knowing it, using one familiar domain (like war, food, or space) to speak
about another.

Linguists use the term metaphorical extension to describe the process of making meaning through
the use of metaphor, which is a mechanism of semantic change.

Example:

"He's going to explode." → not literal, but a metaphor for fury.

"Time is money." → time is figuratively considered something valuable, something which affects the
way we speak of it (spend time, waste time, etc.).
The term "broadcast" originally meant "to scatter seeds" and is now used metaphorically to mean "to
transmit signals."

Chapter 3 :pragmatics
1. Cooperative Principle and Implicature

It was philosopher H. P. Grice who initially developed the Cooperative Principle that informs us how
successful communication in conversations occurs even though the literal meaning is not fully made
explicit. It is from this principle that the dimension of implicature derives.

Grice's Cooperative Principle states: "Make your contribution as is required, at the stage at which it
occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange."

This is supported by four conversational maxims:

Quantity: Be informative—don't give more or less than is needed.

Quality: Be truthful—don't say what you believe is not true or don't have proof for.

Relation: Be relevant—be on topic.

Manner: Be clear—don't be obscure and be sequential.

Implicature is a meaning that is implied when a speaker breaks one of these maxims. Listeners rely
on context and mutual knowledge to make inferences as to what is meant beyond the literal.

Example:

A: "Did you have fun at the party?"

B: "Well, the food was nice."

B is going against the maxim of relation. The implicature is that the rest of the party wasn't
enjoyable.

2. Speech Acts: Locutionary, Illocutionary, and Perlocutionary Acts

Speech Act Theory, as developed by Austin and Searle, accounts for the ways in which utterances can
get things done. One statement can have three facets of meaning or action.
Locutionary Act: The act of saying something meaningful—the literal sentence.

Illocutionary Act: The implied meaning behind the utterance by the speaker (for example, promising,
warning, ordering).

Perlocutionary Act: The real effect the utterance has on the hearer (for example, convincing, scaring,
inspiring).

Example:

You should close the window."

Locutionary: A grammatically correct sentence.

Illocutionary: A request or advice.

Perlocutionary: The hearer closes the window, or is compelled.

3 Politeness and Face-Saving Strategies

Pragmatic interactions are face (self-image), and speakers employ politeness strategies to save their
own and others' face.

In Brown and Levinson's politeness theory, people are concerned with:

Positive face: The desire to be liked, appreciated, and approved.

Negative face: The desire to act freely and without imposition.

Face-threatening acts (FTAs) threaten to offend or impose. Speakers employ strategies to counteract
this:

Positive politeness: Express friendliness or solidarity.

e.g., “Hey buddy, mind helping me out?”

Negative politeness: Show deference and minimize imposition.

e.g., “I’m sorry to bother you, but could you.?”

Off-record strategies: Hint indirectly.

e.g., “It’s cold in here,” as a hint to close the window.

e.g., “Shut the window.”

4Cross-Cultural and Interlanguage Pragmatic

Cross-cultural pragmatics investigates how speakers of different cultures use language in distinct
ways in social contexts, while interlanguage pragmatics examines how language learners cope with
such norms.

Cultures differ on the directness or indirectness of speech acts, preferred politeness strategies, and
face management. Misunderstandings result when pragmatic norms of one culture are used
incorrectly to another. Interlanguage pragmatics investigates how target language social conventions
are learned by foreign language speakers and where they overlap habits from the mother tongue.
Errors are not necessarily grammatical but pragmatic—i.e., being too blunt or sounding too formal.