Chapter 9, ‘Syntax’ is about the rules to form a sentence in a language. If the sentences of a language can be seen as a finite or infinite set of words, there must be a set of explicit rules that can produce all sentences. This type of set of explicit rules is called generative grammar. This grammar will generate only the well formed sentences , not any ill formed structure which has been called ‘all and only’. The chapter shows us the close relation between some extremely close different sentences. For example, we can say, Charlie broke the window and then in a different way, the window was broken by Charlie. Both of these sentences seem to mean the same thing, even though their structures are different. If we read the sentences carefully, we will find that in first example the person Charlie was on focus, not the act, however, in second sentence, the window was focused. Repetition rules also have to be applicable generate a structure .we have to be able to put sentences inside other sentences. We can use and repeat any types of phrase as long as the sentence make sense.
Syntactic also discuss symbols, such as s (=sentence), N (=noun) etc. There are some other symbols that has been used broadly and they are- arrow, ( ) and { }. Any large number of sentences could be represented by tree diagram. For instance, a sentence can be divided by two ways- Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb phrase (VP). Then NP holds two part- Article and Noun and VP consist of Verb and Noun phrase. For example, the girl saw a dog. Here, the (Art), girl (N), saw (V), a (A) and dog (N).