Five signals of syntactic structure

1. word-order—the linear of time sequence in which word appear in an utterance, or the positions of words relative to each other in time.
2. prosody—musical pattern of stress, pitch and juncture in which the words an utterance are spoken, or combination or patterns of pitch, stress and juncture.
3. function word—words with little or no lexical meaning which are used in combining other words into larger structures.
Words largely divide of lexical meaning that used to indicate various functional relationship among the lexical words of an utterance (doesn’t have meaning in grammatical but in lexical), e.g. Does she go there?
There are nine types of function word:
• noun determiner; all, twice, one, third, a, an, this, that, these, those, etc.
• auxiliaries; verb, is, am, are, has, have, do, does, did, will
• qualifiers/ compare; fairly, merely, very, pretty, quite, etc.
• preposition; in, on, at, of, over, etc
• conjunction/ coordinator; and, but, nor…or, not only…but also, etc
• interrogator; who, which, what, etc
• includes; when, like, that, whatever, etc
• sentence linkers; consequently, accordingly, however, even though, as a result
• miscellaneous/ interjection
There are two kinds of meaning:
a) lexical meaning : the meaning of morphemes and words considered in isolation (dictionary meaning).
b) Grammatical/structural meaning: the meaning of the way words are combined in larger structures (sentence)
* the word “am” does not has meaning if stand alone, but has meaning if we combine with other words or we put in a sentence.
e.g. I am being interviewed
4. inflection—suffixes, always final, which adapt words to fit varying of structural positions without changing their lexical meaning or part of speech.
Morphemic changes without changing the lexical meaning, e.g. – ed, plural (s/es)
• work — worked (change in the form of word to show a past tense)
• book — books ( to show a plural)

5. derivational contrast—derivational prefixes and suffixes which change words from one part of speech to another. In short, addition of the prefixes or suffixes that change the world class.
e.g. manage—management—manager
lead—leader—leadership
test—pre-test