Syntactic unit – is always a combination of at least 2 constitutes. They are:
- a word group (belongs to the morphological level)
- a clause, a sentence (belongs to the syntactic level)
- a text or discourse (suprasyntactic level)
Their main features are:
- they are all hierarchical units – the units of the lower level serve the builder material for the higher level
- They are all of a two-fold nature(have a content side and the expression side)
- They can be non-communicative value (which units are not used in communication) – word groups. And communicative nature – sentence, text.
Syntactic meaning – is a complicated notion. It is the way in which separate word-meanings are combined to produce meaningful syntactic units.
Syntactic form – is a distributional formula of the syntactic unit. (John hits the ball – N/Subj V/Pred N/Obj)
Syntactic function – is the function of a unit on the basis of which it is included to a larger unit. In traditional terms it denotes the function of a unit within a sentence.
