Syntactic Hierarchy Groups of sentences (text) Separate sentences can combine together to create one sentence. For example, the sentence “The boy chased the ball” and “He didn’t catch it” can be combined together. You can do this in many ways including stringing one sentence after the other or joining the sentences with conjunctions.1. “The boy chased the ball; he didn’t catch it.”2. “The boy chased the ball, but he didn’t catch it.”3. “The boy chased the ball, and he didn’t catch it.” Sentence Phrases combined to form sentences. The phrase “the girl” combines with the phrase “ran away” to form the sentence: “The girl ran away.” Phrases Words combine to form phrases. The word “the” combines with “girl” to form the phrase: “The girl” Words Morphemes combine to form words. Morphemes belong to categories that determine how they combine. For example, the word 'manageable' is made up of two morphemes 'manage' which is a verb and 'able' which is an adjective, these categories tell the morphemes how to combine so they form the word 'manageable.' Morphemes Smallest meaningful unit in a word. For example, “boys” has two morphemes “boy” and “-s.” Phonemes A unit of sound such as individual consonants and vowels of a language. For example, /p/, /t/ and /æ/ are phonemes in English. Phonetic form A subset of sounds which demonstrates the different variations of a phoneme. Diacritics can be used to represent this, for example aspiration can be added to the letter /p/ in the word /pʰɪt/. Unsegmented Speech Refers to ambiguous streams of words with spaces in between. For example, this can represent how an infant may hear human speech. Analysis of Syntactic Hierarchy Levels Sentence Sentences are the hierarchal structure of combined phrases. When constructing a sentence, two types of phrases are always necessary: Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb Phrase (VP), forming the simplest possible sentence. What determines whether a sentence is grammatically constructed (i.e. the sentence makes sense to a native speaker of the language), is its adherence to the language's phrase structure rules, allowing a language to generate large numbers of sentences. Languages cross-linguistically differ in their phrase structure rules, resulting in the difference of order of the NP and VP, and other phrases included in a sentence. Languages which do have the similar phrase structure rules, however, will translate so that a sentence from one language will be grammatical when translated into