Children learn the rules of syntax (i.e., the grammatical rules specifying how words are combined in a sentence) with very little explicit instruction or tutoring from adults.
Either passage, it seems, could have been generated by a computer programmed with a list of buzzwords and some basic rules of syntax.
Later poets such as Tom Leonard used the urban demotic and rejected the notion, dear to scholars, that Scots was a language like any other, with rules of syntax and usage.
As with Björk, who Panther is being compared to, the words are sung in a way that seems to disregard the normal rules of syntax and all that boring stuff.
Finally, the same words in a different order may mean something quite different, and the rules of syntax that dictate this change of meaning are general ones applying to an indefinite number of other sequences of words in the language.
The vocabulary and rules of syntax of machine language tend to be highly detailed and very far from the natural or mathematical language in which problems are normally formulated.
What are the hardest languages for English speakers to learn? A. Diana Jean Schemo, a Washington correspondent, responds: Ray Clifford, provost of the Defense Language Institute, says the difficulty of learning a foreign language is directly related to how much it differs from a student's native language, in its rules of syntax and grammar, its alphabet and even the culture it springs from.
If our style-book editor learned of it he would surely roll his eyes and buy davidnwelton a stiff drink.All the same, it's clear that outside our little haven of linguistic purity, the verb "blog", like "tweet" and "email", is developing its own rules of syntax.
But people who already know more than one language may be more adept than others, because the process of learning different rules of syntax and grammar, especially early in life, seems to program extra skills into the brain, ones that people appear to retain.
Examples are the representational states implicated in tacit knowledge of the rules of syntax.
On this view, all parametric constraints and rules of syntax are consequences of a fundamental syntactic process called Merge: once Merge was in place, Berwick argues, the rest of UG automatically followed.
