3.1 Levels of Linguistic Analysis

When we speak or write sentences down, they appear to be sequential, with a number of words being strung together. It is through syntactic (grammatical) analysis that the underlying hierarchical structures of sentences are revealed.

For example:

I learned grammar because I came to this class.

This is a sentence because it expresses a complete idea. We can parse this sentence into two composite clauses.

{I learned grammar} {because I came to this class}.

Independent Clause Dependent Clause

If we zoom into each clause, we find different phrases.

{[I] [learned] [grammar]} {because [I] [came] [to [this class]]}.

Noun phrase Verb phrase Noun phrase Noun phrase Verb phrase Prepositional phrase

Still, we can see that phrases can be composed of multiple words (e.g., this class = demonstrative + noun).

In sum, words, phrases, and clauses form the three levels in grammatical analysis.

Below is a tree diagram of showing the internal hierarchical structure of the example sentence.