ABSTRACT
There is some diversity of opinion among linguists about the range of phenomena which may be considered syntactic, and about the ways in which a syntactic description of a language might relate to the phonology and semantics of that language. The upper limit of syntax is the sentence. It is true that larger units than this are quite conceivable - paragraphs, texts but the principles of organisation that operate at these levels are quite different from those that operate within the sentence. The view that a grammar consists of a base and a set of transformational rules performing a variety of operations stimulated a great deal of research in psycholinguistics and child language acquisition. Obviously, phrase structure rules handle aspects of linear order, as the symbols on the right-hand side are stipulated to appear in the desired order. The attentive reader will have noted that the phrase structure grammar of, as well as generating a range of well-formed sentences.
