40 syntax vocab Flashcards
Syntax
structure of sentences.
Grammar
In linguistics ‘grammar’ refers to the complete system of phonological, morphological, syntactic and semantic information and rules that speakers of a given language possess.
Constituents
In synthetic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchy of structure
Phrases
more syntax-specific terminology.
Pronominalisation
the substitution of a constituent by a pronoun.
Pro-form
Type of function word or expression that stands in for another word, phrase, clause or sentence where the meaning is recoverable from the context.
Wh-pronun
we use interrogative pronouns to ask questions. They are: who, was, which, whom, what and whose.
Movement
what type of linguistic structure in which a synthetic unit occurs in a position that is distinct from its expected “base“ or “logical“ position.
Coordination Test
One of the traditional diagnostic tests for constituent structure.
Gapping
an operation which deletes a constituent in one sentence under identity with a constituent of the same type in a preceding sentence.
Sentence-Fragment-test
If the sentence is missing a subject or a verb/predicate.
Structural ambiguity
is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words.
Head
In linguistics, the head of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic.
Noun phrases
composed of a noun plus optional determinantes, adjective phrases, and prepositional phrases.
Prepositional phrases
a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words that modify the object.
Adjective phrases
a group of words headed by an adjective that describes a noun or a pronoun.
Verb phrases
the portion of a sentence that contains both the verb and either a direct or indirect object (the verb’s dependents).
Adverb phrases
is simply a group of two or more words that function as an adverb in a sentence.
Case forms
forms that mark the grammatical function of noun phrases in a sentence of phrase.
Projections
Syntacticians say that the head projects its properties onto the phrase as a whole (which is also the reason why phrases are often called projections of their head).
Word classes
Every word belongs to a word class, which summarises the ways in which it can be used in grammar. There are four major word classes: verb, noun, adjective, adverb. There are five other word classes: determiners, preposition, pronoun, conjunction, interjection.
Syntactic categories
the is a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties: word order, and co-occurrence requirements.
Parts-of-speech
There are eight parts of speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. The part of speech indicates how the word functions in meaning as well as grammatically within the sentence.
Lexical categories
are classes of words (e.g., noun, verb, preposition), which differ in how other words can be constructed out of them.
Determiner
are a nominal syntactic category distinct both from adjectives and nouns, despite the close affinity among them.
Phrase structure rules
are a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language’s syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957.
Subordinate clauses
(or dependent clause) is a clause that cannot stand alone as a complete sentence because it does not express a complete thought.
Clause
groups of words that contain both a subject and a predicate.
Sentences
are defined as the largest syntactic units and they are made up of one or more clauses.
Matrix Clause
The sentences in (35) are complex sentences, consisting of two clauses, a superordinate clause (often called matrix clause) and a subordinate clause.
Main clause
refers to clauses that can stand on their own.
Predicate
is the grammatical term for the words in a sentence or clause that describe the action but not the subject. In other words, the predicate explains what the subject does.
Subject verb agreement
a syntactic process which requires subject and verb to share the same person and number features.
Transitive verbs
is a verb that requires an object to receive the action.
Intransitive verbs
as a verb that does not take a direct object.
Ditransitive verbs
(or bitransitive) verb is a transitive verb whose contextual use corresponds to a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient.
Direct object
one of the objects denotes an entity that undergoes the action or process denoted by the verb.
Adverbial
an adverbial (abbreviated adv) is a word (an adverb) or a group of words (an adverbial clause or adverbial phrase) that modifies or more closely defines the sentence or the verb.
Complement
a more general term used in linguistics or such semantically and structurally highly dependent sister constituents of heads.
Predicative complements
completes the meaning of a sentence by giving information about a noun.
