| The chapters of part three describe the scope of the grammar of English and introduce its most basic structures. One aim of this work is to explicate a formal relationship between grammatical and semantic structures. This means that as the grammar describes structures according to the syntactic level of analysis, it will be important at each step to compare them to the corresponding structures of their content according to the semantic level. Traditionally linguists have defined structures for sentences and phrases using both criteria without always being explicit about the fact. This has evolved into a restricting or limiting of the objects of grammatical description first to only certain kinds of utterances — those called sentences — and then further to only certain kinds of sentences — those called grammatical. (For a pretheoretical definition of a sentence see the basic grammar on this site: §§ 106-122.) |