Ch. 3 Syntax Flashcards
To grammar even kings bow
JB Moliere
Any speaker of any human language can produce and understand
An infinite number of sentences
Sentences are composed of discrete units that are combined by
Rules
The part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge of sentences and their structures is called
Syntax
The ________ combine words into phrases and phrases into sentences.
Rules of syntax
The syntax rules determine
The correct word order for a language
English is a _____ language
Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)
Is the following sentence grammatical?
The President nominated a new Supreme Court justice
Yes
Is the following sentence grammatical?
President the Supreme new justice Court a nominated
No
A second important role of the syntax is to
Describe the relationship between the meaning of a particular group of words and the arrangement of the words
Do the following sentences have the same semantical meaning?
- I mean what I say.
- I say what I mean.
No
The rules of the syntax also specify the _______ of a sentence. Such as subject and direct object
Grammatical relations
Hierarchical diagrams used to illustrate sentence structures
Tree Diagrams
The phenomenon in which the same sequence of words has two or more meanings accounted for by different phrase structure analyses
Structural ambiguity
The rules of syntax permit speakers to
produce and understand a limitless number of sentences never produced or heard before
True or False
Sentences can be grammatical even if they are difficult to interpret.
True
ex: Jabberwocky
The syntactic rules that permit us to produce, understand, and make grammaticality judgements are
unconscious rules
The grammar is a ______ different from the ______ that we are taught in school.
Mental grammar… prescriptive grammar
What type of speech is “the” in a tree diagram?
Determiner
What is the tree structure for “the child found a puppy”
S
/ \
NP VP
/ \ / \
Det N. V. NP
|. |. |. /. \
the. child found det. N
| |
a. puppyThe natural groupings or parts of a sentence are called
constituents
The following three tests are for what?
- Stand alone test
- Replacement by a pronoun
- Move as a unit
To reveal the constituents of a sentence
The hierarchically arranged syntactic units such as noun phrase and verb phrase that underlie every sentence
Constituent structure
Experimental evidence has shown that speakers do not mentally represent sentences as strings of words, but rather in terms of
constituents
What was an experiment that proved we hear sentences in constituents?
The clicking test
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is called
a syntactic category
Characteristics of a Noun Phrase
- may function as subjects or as objects
- often contains determiner and a noun
- may contain proper name, a pronoun, a noun without a determiner, or a clause or sentence
You can use the following three sentences to check what?
“what/who I heard was ______”
“who found ______?”
“______ was seen by everyone”
To test if a phrase is a noun phrase
You can use the following sentence to check what?
“the child ______”
To test is a phrase is a verb phrase
True or false
Slept is a verb phrase
True
True or false
A Bird is a verb phrase
False
True or false
The red banjo is a noun phrase
True
True or false
Went is a noun phrase
False
NP, VP, AdjP, PP, and AdvP are what?
Phrasal categories
N, V, P, Adj, Adv are what?
Lexical categories
a, the, and demonstratives such as this, that, these, those are in what category?
Determiner
Determiners are what category?
Functional
All languages have
syntactic categories
A point in a tree where branches join
a node
We refer to categories under the same node as
sisters
When you have an adjective you need to utilize what theory?
X bar
A tree diagram with syntactic category information is called a
Phrase structure tree (PS) or a Constituent structure tree
PS trees represent three aspects of a speaker’s syntactic knowledge
- the linear order of the words in a sentence
- the identification of the syntactic categories of words and groups of words
- the hierarchical organization of the syntactic categories as determined by the x-bar schema
Categories that are immediately dominated by the same node are
sisters
The _____ of a sentence is the NP immediately dominated by __ and the _______ is the NP immediately dominated by __.
subject … S … direct object … V
A verb that requires an NP complement
Transitive verb (dependent)
A verb that cannot take an NP complement
Intransitive verb (independent)
The information about the complement types selected by particular verbs and other lexical items is called
c-selection or subcategorization
c stands for categorial
A verb also includes in it’s lexical entry a specification that requires certain semantic properties of its subjects and complements, just as it selects for syntactic categories.
S-Selection (s stands for semantic)
An example of s-selection
the verb murder requires its subject and object to be animate
The well formedness of a phrase depends on at least two factors
- whether the phrase conforms to the structural constraints of the language as expressed in the x-bar schema
- whether it obeys the selectional requirements of the head (c-selection and s-selection)
The info presented in the PS tree and by the x-bar schema can also be conveyed by another formal device
phrase structure rules
True or false
PS rules specify the well formed structures of a particular language precisely and concisely
True
A rule that repeats itself
Recursive rule
A _____ is defined structurally as sister to the head X.
complement
A sentence asserting that a situation will happen
Declarative sentences
A sentence asking whether or not a situation will happen
Yes-no questions
A formal device that relocates the material in a sentence
Move or a transformational rule
The basic structures of sentences (the bottom of a tree)
deep structures or d-structures
The derived structures of sentences (top level of a tree)
surface structures or s-structures
We call the points of variation
parameters
True or false
In ASL they do not use S-V-O
False, ASL uses SVO
Phrase structure trees reflect the speaker’s
mental representation of a sentence
Ambiguous sentences may have
more than one PS tree
The hierarchical structure of phrasal categories is
universal
A formally stated explicit description of the mental grammar or the speakers linguistic competence
Grammar
The knowledge that a speaker has about the vocabulary of his or her language
Lexicon
Lexicon contains
Semantic and syntactic information
UG specifies that syntactic rules are
structure dependent
Constituency test
- Replacement by pronoun
- move as a unit
- stand alone test
What phrase is the subject?
Noun phrase
What phrase is the predicate?
Verb phrase
Verb that needs help (dependent)
transitive
Verb that doesn’t need help (independent)
intransitive
True or false
PS trees can have 2 or more branches
False, only 2
Constituency is important to know if a sentence is
grammatically correct
Chunking helps us to read/comprehend because
we process in chunks, not word by word but group by group
Prepositions give us info about
location/direction
The new theory that allows us to add additional layers to a tree, that we previously were unable to do
X-bar theory
Knowing that the 3rd person singular requires “s” on verb to be grammatical is an example of what selection?
(ex: he sleeps late)
C-selection/subcategorization
Knowing that you can’t grammatically say “I murdered an ant” is an example of what selection?
S-selection/ semantic selection
True or false
If a sentence is ambiguous you just make one tree based off your understanding of it
False, it requires more than one tree
Surface or linear structure is
the regular sentence
Deep structure is
the tree
Rules in syntax are what happens in deep structure to get to
surface structure
CP =
complementizer phrase
What types of words signify a complementizer phrase?
If/Whether
A verb whose complement contains a NP and a PP
ex: give in “he gave a cat to sally”
Di-transitive verb
