what is a sentence made up of
phrases, which may in turn contain other phrases
Constituents of the same type can appear in the same places as each other
“they have have the same distribution”
Languages differ in their syntax
but the principles of hierarchical composition are the same
semantic properties
the meaning of the word
phonological properties
pronunciation distinction + syntactic properties
Grammatical functions are encoded in english
most commonly by the syntactic structure
Syncretism
the merging of different inflectional varieties of a word