Syntactic analysis of english comlex sentences
![“The placement of words and phrases in a particular order is known as
syntax in English. It is easy to alter the meaning of the entire sentence by shifting
even one word's position. Every language has constraints regarding what words
belong in what contexts. Skilled authors can work these laws to their advantage to
create more lyrical or emotional phrases. Syntax is an advanced issue in language,
which can make it challenging to understand. We go over the fundamentals and
several kinds of syntax in this book, along with some syntax examples, to help you
communicate efficiently. Let's begin with a more comprehensive definition of
syntax.” [16; p. 65-68]
It concerns which words and sentences appear in what order. The collection
of linguistic rules known as syntax determines whether a given word order is well-
formed and what, if any, functional relationships apply to it. The English phrase
"cat the mat on" is an example of a poorly worded sentence. Syntax is defined
hierarchically and recursively to mirror how native speakers use their language and
to keep the set conventions reasonable. Words, the smallest well-formed unit,
phrases, which are legal word sequences, clauses, and sentences, which are also
legal phrase sequences, are among the structures. Conjunctions like "and" can be
used to join sentences together to form compound sentences.
“The conventions used to describe syntax come from two fields of study:
linguistics, which dates back to the work of the first Sanskrit grammarians in the
eighth century BCE; and computational science, which has standardized and
updated the labeling of syntactic units to better suit automated processing
requirements. In the past, linguists used qualitative and empirical methods to
determine what constitutes a legal constituent in a given language. They would
examine written documents or speak with native speakers of the language to
ascertain which phrases are acceptable to native speakers and which words can be
used interchangeably without affecting grammar. Today, this method is still
helpful for confirming the syntactic labels of uncommon statements. For instance,
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![in the sentence "I would rather deal with the side effects of my medication," one
can question whether the word "with" functions as a preposition, a function word
more closely related to the noun phrase "the side effects," or if it is a part of the
complex verb "deal with." The fact that we may replace "deal with" with the verb
"tolerate" shows that "deal with" is a singular verb.” [5; p. 23-25]
The word is usually thought of as the smallest unit in English. But some
finer points of differentiation are made by qualified linguists. Linguists, for
instance, refer to the canonical form of a word that contains multiple variants for
producing the plural or a certain tense as the lemma, root, or base form. Common
nouns such as "apple" would have this singular form. It is the untensed form for
verbs, which is the form that comes after the word "to" in an infinitive, as "to eat,"
"to be," or "to go." Lexicologists refer to a word type, which comprises the set of
lemma and all of its variations, as a lexeme.
The term morpheme is used to describe strings that carry meaning but may
be smaller than a word, such as prefixes (which are substrings at the front of a
word) and suffixes (which are substrings at the end of a word). Both can add either
syntactic or semantic information to a word. Analyzing a word into morphemes is
called “morphology”. Finding the root is called lemmatization. NLP work
sometimes uses the notion of “stems” instead of roots. Stems are substrings of a
word, which can depend on an implementation, as there is no standard form. They
are useful for specifying patterns to match all members of a lexeme. NLP work
also uses the term “token”, which is an instance of a word as it occurs in use. So, if
a sentence includes the same word twice, there will be two separate tokens created
for it.
Broad syntactic categories of words and the syntactic attributes that occur as
variants of spelling. We will consider these ten types: nouns, pronouns, proper
nouns, determiners, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and wh-
words. Most syntactic attributes are indicated by a specific character associated
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![with the features involved (e.g., plurals are usually formed by adding “s” and past
tense is usually formed by adding “ed”), but sometimes these forms exist as an
entirely different word, that we refer to as “irregular”, such as “was” being the
“first person past tense” form of the verb “to be”.
“Nouns, Pronouns, and Proper Nouns. Nouns are used to name or describe
entities, which might be physical (such as “cat” or “rock”) or abstract (such as
“freedom” or “laughter”) or both (such as “city” or “company”). Nouns can be
singular or plural. The plural form is usually marked with the suffix “s” or “es”, as
in “cats”; if a word ends in “y”, it is changed to “i” before adding the suffix. Figure
3.1 includes several examples. Some plurals are irregular, as in “children” or
“knives”. Nouns occur in the subjects of sentences and as objects following a verb
or preposition.” [11; p. 54-61]
Figure 3.2 includes examples of irregular nouns. Some nouns (called “count”
nouns), unless they are plural, require a determiner or cardinal number to specify the
denoted set, e.g. “the boy” or “three boys”.
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![place of a determiner, e.g., “my book” or “your house” and this subclass may also be
assigned a separate part of speech. Also, some pronouns are used to form a question
and thus also merit their own labels. They include both regular wh-pronouns, including
“what”, “who”, and “whom,” and possessive wh-pronouns, such as “whose”. [6; p. 82-
86]
Determiners. The terms "the," "a," "an," "that," "these," "this," and "those" are
examples of determiners. In inquiries, determiners like "what" and "which" are also
employed. Determiners only come before any nouns or adjectives in noun phrases.
Certain common nouns like "water" or "rice" that represent large quantities or are
plural like "cats" do not need a determiner. In general, determiners are not allowed for
proper nouns, unless they are plural (like "The Smiths") or part of the name itself (like
"The Ohio State University"). A determiner can be substituted by a possessive phrase,
denoted by an apostrophe and the suffix "-s," as in "my mother's house." Regular or
possessive pronouns never come before determiners.
Verbs are usually tensed (past, present, future). They include both verbs
where the tensed forms are regular or irregular. Also, in some contexts, verbs can
appear untensed, such as after an auxiliary or after the word “to”. Verbs are also
marked for number (singular or plural), and for person. First person is “I”; second
person is “you”; and third person is “he”, “she”, or “it”. The third-person singular form
is marked with “-s”; the non-3rd person singular present looks the same as the root
form. Verbs also have participle forms for past (eg., “broken” or “thought”) and
present (e.g., “thinking”). Some verbs require a particle which is similar to a
preposition except that it forms an essential part of the meaning of the verb that can be
moved either before or after another argument, as in “she took off her hat” or “she took
her hat off”.
Verbs that can be main verbs are an open class. Verbs that are modals or
auxiliary verbs (also called helping verbs) are a closed class . They are used along with
a main verb to express ability (“can”, “could”), possibility (“may”, “might”), necessity
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![communications, to convey sophisticated ideas and to create a diverse range of
sentence structures. Understanding the structure and significance of complex
sentences allows individuals to articulate intricate relationships and ideas in a
single sentence. By effectively combining independent and dependent clauses,
complex sentences contribute to the richness and sophistication of language and
communication.” [3; p. 69-77]
Types of Dependent Clauses. Adverbial Clause: This type of dependent
clause functions as an adverb, modifying the verb in the independent clause. It
provides information about the time, place, manner, reason, or condition related to
the action in the main clause. For example: "When the sun sets, the stars become
visible."
Adjectival Clause (Relative Clause): This clause functions as an adjective,
providing additional information about a noun in the independent clause. It often
begins with relative pronouns such as "who," "which," "that," or "whom." For
instance: "The book that you lent me was incredibly insightful."
Noun Clause: This type of dependent clause functions as a noun, often
serving as the subject, object, or complement of the main clause. For example:
"What you said deeply resonated with me."
Creating Sentence Variety: By using complex sentences, one can add
intricacy and variety to writing or speech. This variety adds texture to the flow of
language, capturing and maintaining the audience's attention.
Conveying Complex Ideas : Complex sentences enable the articulation of
complex ideas and relationships in a single sentence, contributing to a robust and
sophisticated expression of information. This is particularly valuable in writing or
speech that seeks to convey depth and nuance.
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![conclusions because there is irregularity in the patterns of distribution of these
grammatical traits among genres throughout the two dialectal contexts examined.”
[9; p. 43-47]
For instance, when we combine attestations of compound complex sentences
which have complex sentences within them with complex sentences, we observe
irregular usage variations both cross-generically and cross-dialectally. As can be
compared in Figure 1 below, usage variations for complex and compound complex
sentences across the Ghanaian and British genres are between 49% and 62% for
Academic Social Science, 62% and 55% for Academic Natural Science and 71%
and 61% for Administrative Writing. The only consistency here is the fact that the
complex and compound complex sentences are dominant across the three genres.
Cross-dialectally, the observable variations are 49%, 62% and 77% for Ghanaian
Academic Social Science, Academic Natural Science and Administrative Writing
and 62%, 55% and 61% for British Academic Social Science, Academic Natural
Science and Administrative Writing. These patterns, captured in Figure 1 below,
show some similarity among the British genres, especially between Academic
Social Science and Administrative Writing.
“Apart from the fact that the complex sentence has been identified with
planned discourse, our data indicate that the complex sentence is essential for the
genres we investigated and so is dominant across these genres from the two
dialectal perspectives. It is observed that the two academic genres have a tendency
of integrating ideas from related extant literature to establish best applicable
methodologies and theories. It is not surprising that the complex and compound
complex sentences should be dominant to help perform the communicative
function of integration of ideas. Similarly, one observes that the instructional and
directive nature of administrative writing equally involves integrating ideas. Thus,
even though a close study of the types of complex sentence used across the
administrative texts reveals some variability across Ghanaian and British texts, one
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![observes at this stage that the complex sentence is similarly preferred across
Ghanaian and British administrative texts.” [20; p. 291-301]
It seems sense that compound and simple phrases are not chosen for reasons
of stylistic beauty, and possibly also for organizing thoughts into logical
arguments. This is due to the fact that coupling simple sentences into compound
sentences restricts the breadth and dynamism of logical arguments that can be
made, whereas a series of simple sentences impedes communication, especially
when written. Because of their communication qualities, compound sentences are
preferred in writing intended for younger readers because of the symmetrical link
between their parts, while simple sentences usually give a text a "frantic or fast
paced feel. Because of this, complex sentence patterns are often drawn from the
participants in the three texts examined (adults versus experts) and their desire to
synthesize concepts and debate out perspectives. Logical relationships between
ideas are the subject of complicated structures and tactical relations of sentences.
Among the structural forms of dependent clauses, complementation in
particular “presents a major challenge for second language learners” because not
all of them can complement any kind of complement-taking predicator. Therefore,
it is reasonable to anticipate that these structures will be used differently in various
texts from both native and nonnative contexts. So, the question was to investigate
the complicated statement in more detail to see if the data would show consistent
trends in the application of different combinatorial techniques.
In academic writing, complex sentences are frequently utilized since they are
crucial for clear communication. Students majoring in English in particular should
be able to communicate ideas, arguments, and critical analyses through the mastery
of complicated language structures. However, an increasing amount of evidence
suggests that many students including those majoring in English have difficulty
employing complicated sentences effectively, which may eventually impede their
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![success in the classroom. Many pupils lacked a thorough comprehension of the
grammatical structures and principles that underpin complicated sentences. They
proposed that students might enhance their usage of complicated sentences in their
writing by addressing these knowledge gaps through focused educational
interventions.
Numerous factors, according to a study of the research, make complicated
sentence constructions difficult for pupils to understand. Because they don't know
the laws of grammar, pupils in academic contexts usually don't use complicated
sentence constructions. Lack of exposure to the structures in spoken or written
contexts is a significant contributing factor that might cause a lack of familiarity
with the structures and their purposes. Unfamiliarity with academic jargon is
another concern, since students may not be familiar with the specialist terminology
used in complex sentence patterns. Furthermore, a lot of children have trouble with
syntax, which is the rules for stringing words together to form sentences. This can
lead to mistakes with word order, conjunctions, and punctuation.
“A significant source of difficulty that students experience in using complex
sentence structures is a lack of exposure to the structures, which results in
unfamiliarity with their use and function. This situation is often coupled with
unfamiliarity with specialized academic vocabulary, which may be essential in
constructing complex sentences. Syntax, which is the system for combining words
into sentences, has also been identified as a factor that affects students’ ability to
use complex sentence structures accurately. The use of complex sentence
structures is essential for effective academic writing. However, students often
struggle to use complex sentence structures due to factors such as inadequate
grammar instruction and limited exposure to such structures conducted research on
Chinese students' English writing and found that both lexical and grammatical
knowledge played a crucial role in their performance.” [14; p. 66-74]
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![which is another significant complex structure. It has been noted that even for
proficient non-native English speakers, it is more challenging to put together
clauses in speech to form complicated sentences. Nonetheless, sentence types,
clause combinations, finite and nonfinite clauses, subordination, and phrase
structure have received the majority of attention in this field of study. The structure
of the difficult statement has not gotten much attention. ” [10; p. 43-61 ]
It has been observed in the literature that the sentence has generally been
understudied. One of the reasons why the sentence and its subtypes have not
received much empirical attention may be attributed to the disagreement about the
status of the sentence in the literature. In descriptive grammar the sentence is
considered the highest grammatical unit, followed by the clause, the phrase, the
word and the morpheme on the grammatical rank scale. Elsewhere, however,
especially in functional linguistics, the argument has been raised about the concept
of the sentence as a stretch “of written text bounded by full 186 stops or the
equivalent”. The argument is that this definition makes the sentence a property of
written texts since the features of the sentences mentioned in this definition are
limited to written texts only. Thus, proponents of this argument consider the
sentence as a problematic construct since its categorization has been based on
written text. The problem really, as they rightly observe it, is with describing the
sentence within spoken texts.
“As Thompson puts it, “the sentence is an idealization of the written
language which it is often difficult to impose on spoken language. Based on this
argument, certain grammars intentionally avoid treating the sentence in any detail.
However, much as this argument makes a lot of sense, it does not disqualify an
empirical study of the sentence, especially when the investigation is limited to
written data like the current study. The more reason why it is compellingly
necessary to investigate the sentence (especially the complex subtype) particularly
across written genres is that the written genre by its nature is observed to be
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![complex. This means that discussions of complexity in written texts should begin
with the sentence. This is because, it is partly through such investigations that we
will be able to ascertain the levels and the nature of the complexity of written
genres within the scope of the sentence.” [19; p. 84-87 ]
Many viewpoints have been used to investigate linguistic diversity. Dialectal
variance and functional register variation are two of these viewpoints. Scholars
studying new/world English in particular have suggested that dialectal variations
are largely reflections of linguistic choices that vary depending on the location of
usage. Kachru was actually one of the first academics to notice this. The concentric
circle, which divides English dialects worldwide into three categories the inner
circle, which includes English spoken by native speakers; the outer circle, which
includes English spoken in former British colonies where it is used as a second or
official language; and the expanding circle was used by him to explain dialectal
variation between native and nonnative English.
2.2 Challenges and limitations of syntactic analysis in real-world use
Syntactic analysis (parsing) of natural languages is a subfield of natural
language processing (NLP) that is often claimed to be a “corner stone” of the area,
a necessary base for any advanced language processing and real understanding.
Syntactic analysis deals with revealing the sentence structure, language units
bearing meaning and relationships among them; it is hard to imagine real language
understanding without this information. On the other hand, in current practical
“intelligent” applications, syntactic processing is often substituted by purely
stochastic methods. There are even visible opinions in the NLP community
claiming that syntactic analysis is not really needed in practical applications.
Syntactic analysis, while a powerful tool for understanding language
structure, faces several challenges and limitations in real-world use. These
challenges span from the complexities of natural language to the computational
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![Cross-linguistic Variation. Languages exhibit a wide range of syntactic
structures and word orders. Developing syntactic parsers that can handle cross-
linguistic variations and adapt to diverse languages remains a formidable
challenge.
Syntactic Variants and Informal Language. Informal language, dialects, and
spoken language often deviate from standard syntactic rules, posing challenges for
syntactic parsers that are trained on formal written texts.
Multilingual Syntax. Understanding and parsing the syntax of multiple
languages within a single system adds complexity. Handling multilingual data and
accommodating variations across languages presents a substantial challenge for
syntactic analysis.
Real-time Parsing and Speech Recognition. Real-time parsing and speech
recognition applications demand high processing speeds and low latency, raising
challenges in balancing efficiency with syntactic analysis.” [17; p. 51-59 ]
While syntactic analysis offers valuable insights into language structure, the
challenges and limitations it faces in real-world applications highlight the
complexities of natural language and the ongoing efforts to develop robust systems
capable of addressing these nuances. These challenges drive ongoing research and
development in computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Features of syntax analysis:
“Syntax Trees: Syntax analysis creates a syntax tree, which is a
hierarchical representation of the code’s structure. The tree shows the relationship
between the various parts of the code, including statements, expressions, and
operators.
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![Context-Free Grammar: Syntax analysis uses context-free grammar to
define the syntax of the programming language. Context-free grammar is a
formal language used to describe the structure of programming languages.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Parsing: Syntax analysis can be performed
using two main approaches: top-down parsing and bottom-up parsing. Top-down
parsing starts from the highest level of the syntax tree and works its way down,
while bottom-up parsing starts from the lowest level and works its way up.
Error Detection: Syntax analysis is responsible for detecting syntax errors
in the code. If the code does not conform to the rules of the programming
language, the parser will report an error and halt the compilation process.
Intermediate Code Generation: Syntax analysis generates an intermediate
representation of the code, which is used by the subsequent phases of the
compiler. The intermediate representation is usually a more abstract form of the
code, which is easier to work with than the original source code.
Optimization: Syntax analysis can perform basic optimizations on the code,
such as removing redundant code and simplifying expressions. The pushdown
automata is used to design the syntax analysis phase. The Grammar for a
Language consists of Production rules. ” [7; p. 209]
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Syntactic analysis of english comlex sentences