Ch. 5 Syntax Flashcards
linguistic expressions
a piece of language–with a certain form, meaning, syntactic properties
grammatical
when a string of words really does form a sentence of some language
ungrammatical
some string of words does not form a sentence
grammatically judgment
reflection fo speakers’ mental grammar, and not a test of their conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules
subject
an expression that occurs to the left of the verb in a sentence
object
noun phrase occurs to the right of the verb in a sentence
compositionality
the fact that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined
lexical expressions
words; phrasal expressions addign words make bigger meaning
syntactic properties
properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely, word order and co-occurrence properties
word order
how expressions allowed to be ordered with respect to one another
co-occurrence
the set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence
arguments
if expression Y necessitates expression X
complements
non-subject arguments
adjuncts
a linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional
modifiers
also referred to as adjuncts
agreement
the phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.
morphosyntax
the name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar
syntactic constituent
a group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression
cleft
a type of sentence that has the general form it is/ was X that Y
conjunct
an argument of a coordinating conjuction such as and or or
syntactic categories
a group of expressions that have a very similar syntactic properties
syntactic distribution
refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur
noun phrases
NP the name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, proper nouns, and all other expressions
determiners
the name of a lexical category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc.
verb phrase
VP the name of a syntactic category that consists of all words to which, for example, -ing or -able can be suffixed.
intransitive verbs
the name for the set of lexical expressions
transitive verbs
TV consists of those expressions that if combines with an expression of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase
ditransitive verbs
consists of those expressions that if combines with two expressions of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase
sentential complement verbs
if combines with a sentence to their right result in a verb phrase
adverb
name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as quickly, well, furiously, etc.
VP adjunct
consist of expressions which combines with a noun phrase
N adjuncts
a kind of adjunct that combines with an expression of syntactic category noun and all other expressions with syntactic distributions
prepositional phrase
contains a preposition and NP
lexicon
a mental repository of linguistic information about words anf other lexical expressions including their form, meaning, morphological and syntactic properties
lexical entries
a representation of a lexical and its linguistic properties within a descriptive grammar of some language
phrase structure rules
a recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories.
phrase structure tree
a visual representation of how phrase are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phase structural rules
ambiguous
the phenomenon by which a single linguistic form can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression
lexical ambiguity or homophony
the phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form
structural ambiguity
the phenomenon where a single string of words is the form of more than one distinct phrasal expression.
