Summary

Phrases combine to produce clauses. They combine in different orders, and the links between them are marked in various ways. Some clauses have special markers such as do, does, did for YES–NO INTERROGATIVES or conjunctions such as although, if and that. The above differences are said to reflect different constructions; phrases are constructed or put together in different ways to enable speakers and writers to signal differences in meaning. The various syntactic constructions in a given language form a system; one task of syntactic analysis is to work out and state how the constructions are interconnected.