Setningarmynd

Setningarmynd is a term in Icelandic linguistics and language teaching that refers to the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. It describes how words are organized into units such as phrases and clauses and how those units relate to one another within a sentence. The concept encompasses both the observable surface form of a sentence and its underlying grammatical organization, and it is used when analyzing word order, agreement, and clause hierarchy in Icelandic and other languages.

In practice, setningarmyndir are produced as various representations. Traditional sentence diagrams lay out subjects, predicates, objects, and modifiers in a tree-like form. More modern approaches use constituency trees or dependency graphs to show hierarchical relations and head–dependent links. In Icelandic, setningarmyndir must account for inflection, case marking, and verb conjugation, which influence how constituents map onto roles such as subject, object, and adverbial modifiers. Setningarmyndir are used in language education to teach syntax, in linguistic research to compare sentence structures, and in computational linguistics to aid parsing and annotation.

Example: the simple sentence "Kötturinn borðar bókina" can be analyzed as a subject NP (Kötturinn) and a predicate VP (borðar bókina), with the direct object bókina receiving the action. A diagram or tree would show the hierarchical relationship between the noun phrase and the verb phrase and the object within the verb phrase.

See also: setningfræði, setningarbygging, setningargerð, setningamyndun, syntactic parsing.