5.0 What is syntax?

Question 1

Syntax

Answer 1

Has to do with how sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words.

Question 2

Linguistic Expressions

Answer 2

Words and phrases are all linguistic expressions.

Question 3

Grammatical Judgement

Answer 3

When a speaker of a given language is uniquely qualified to decide whether a string of words really does form a sentence of some language.

Question 4

Subject

Answer 4

The expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb.

Question 5

Principle of Compositionality

Answer 5

The meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined.

Question 6

Phrasal Expressions

Answer 6

The different ways of syntactically combining lexical expressions which will change the meaning.

Question 7

Syntactic Properties

Answer 7

Properties of expressions that determine their behavior.

Question 8

Word Order

Answer 8

How expressions are allowed to be ordered with respect to one another.

Question 9

Complements

Answer 9

Non-subject arguments.

Question 10

Adjuncts

Answer 10

Certain kinds of expressions whose occurrence in a sentence is purely optional.

Question 11

Modifiers

Answer 11

This is another name for adjuncts such as adjectives because they modify meanings.

Question 12

Agreement

Answer 12

Distinct expressions in a sentence may be required to have the same value for some grammatical feature, in which case we say that they agree with the respect to that feature.

Question 13

Syntactic Constituent

Answer 13

The idea that certain groups of expressions within a larger phrase can form a syntactic unit.

Question 14

Cleft

Answer 14

A kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced (or moved) to the left.

Question 15

Substitution

Answer 15

Test that involves replacing a constituent with a single word (or simple phrase).

Question 16

Pro-Form

Answer 16

words that can be replaced in a sentence such as pro-verbs and pro-nouns.

Question 17

Syntactic Categories

Answer 17

Terms like sentence, noun, noun phrase, attributive, adjective, etc, either relying on your intuitive or understanding of them or pointing out particular examples.

Question 18

Syntactic Distribution

Answer 18

When two expressions that have very similar syntactic properties, they are usually interchangeable in a sentence; you can substitute them for one another and still have a grammatical sentence.

Question 19

Noun Phrases

Answer 19

Consists of personal pronouns, proper names, and any other expressions that have the same distribution.

Question 20

Nouns

Answer 20

Expressions such as desk and cat belong to this syntactic category.

Question 21

Determiners

Answer 21

Nouns can co-occur with determiners like “the” while noun phrases cannot.

Question 22

Count Ons

Answer 22

Nouns like cat or desk, defined in simple terms as being able to be counted ex. five cats or 4 desk.

Question 23

Mass Nouns

Answer 23

When these nouns occur in the singular they must co-occur with a determiner which can be contrasted with mass nouns, which cannot be counted and cannot (normally) be pluralized.

Question 24

Verb Phrases

Answer 24

Consists of those expressions that when combined with noun phrases on their left, will result in a sentence.

Question 25

Intransitive Verbs

Answer 25

Verbs that require no compliment.

Question 26

Transitive Verbs

Answer 26

Require a noun phrase compliment to form a verb phrase and form their own syntactic category.

Question 27

Ditransitive Verbs

Answer 27

Verbs such as gave belong to this syntactic category. Which neither combined with just one of its objects or by itself creates a verb phrase.

Question 28

Sentential Complement Verbs

Answer 28

Verbs that require a complement of category sentence to form a verb phrases.

Question 29

Adverb

Answer 29

Many expressions that can occur in a verb phrase as adjuncts are of this category.

Question 30

Verb Phrase Adjuncts

Answer 30

VPs with or without adjuncts have the same distribution. Which from this we can conclude that adverbs combine with a VP to form an expression of category VP.

Question 31

Noun Adjuncts

Answer 31

Adjectives which can combine nouns, resulting in an expression of category Noun.

Question 32

Prepositional Phrase

Answer 32

Verb phrase adjunct which consists of a preposition and a noun phrase.

Question 33

Preposition

Answer 33

Special group of words that connects a noun to a pronoun.

Question 34

Lexicon

Answer 34

In which we assign lexical expressions to syntactic categories.

Question 35

Lexical Entreies

Answer 35

Consists of a syntactic category name followed by an arrow followed by a word.

Question 36

Phrase Structure Rules

Answer 36

Are used to capture patterns of syntactic combination.

Question 37

Phrase Structure Tree

Answer 37

The way we display that a sentence is built up from lexical expressions using the phrase structure rules.

Question 38

Ambiguity

Answer 38

Showing that the same expressions can comine in different ways, resulting in distinct phrases that nevertheless have exactly the same form.

Question 39

Ambiguous

Answer 39

Meaning that a word or sequence of words can correspond to more than one distinct expression.

Question 40

Homophony

Answer 40

Expressions that correspond to the same single-word form are said to be homophonous.