Syntax: Terminology
Some of these words may have other meanings; the meanings listed below are the ones relevant to the activity
Clause: A syntactic construction that includes at the minimum a subject and a predicate. It forms a simple sentence or is a part of a sentence. E.g., "Naomi reads" is a clause, as it includes a subject (Naomi) and a verbal predicate (reads). It is also a simple sentence. "Naomi reads and Taylor watches her" has two clauses connected by "and."
Morpheme: A minimal unit of meaning, or a unit that cannot be further divided into smaller grammatical parts. E.g., "microwave" has two morphemes: "micro" (small) and "wave". None of these can be further divided into independent units of meaning.
Parts of speech: Lexical categories defining words by their functions. E.g., in the sentence "David writes beautifully" the three words are a noun, a verb, and an adverb, respectively.
Phrase: A sequence of two or more words that together can form a part of a clause or a sentence. E.g., "Dan's book" is a phrase that can be included in sentences like "Dan's book was stolen", "I don't like Dan's book", etc., but is not an independent unit or a complete sentence. It can be a noun phrase (a phrase that contains a noun), a verbal phrase (a phrase that contains a verb), a prepositional phrase, etc. E.g., "the cat" is a noun phrase, "goes to sleep" is a verbal phrase, and "in the basket" is a prepositional phrase. Noun phrases, verbal phrases and prepositional phrases are often referred to in the literature as NP, VP, and PP, respectively.
Predicate: A component of a clause that tells something about the subject. E.g., in the clause "Bakers make bread" the subject is "bakers" and the predicate tells us something about them, that is, they "make bread". In the clause "The exam is difficult" the subject is "the exams", and we are given some information about it-- it "is difficult".
Sentence: One or more words that express a complete and independent idea (a question, a statement, etc.). In speech, sentences are often preceded and followed by a short pause, and have typical intonation patterns. They may be composed of a number of clauses. E.g., the sentence "The dog sleeps, while the cat plays in the garden" is a sentence composed of two clauses.
Subject: One of the two required components of a clause, usually a noun that is the center of the clause, in that it performs the action of which the clause tells or is in the state described in the clause. E.g., Pete in "Pete ran to his father" and "Pete was hungry".
Syntactic rules: Rules that determine the order of words in a sentence. E.g., the rule for simple sentences in English may look like S=subject+predicate, or S=NP+VP.
Syntax: The area of linguistics that studies our ability to construct phrases, clauses, and sentences using words and morphemes.
Tree diagrams: Diagrams used to record the structure of a sentence, like the examples below:
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