Ch 5. Syntax Flashcards
linguistic expressions
a piece of language- it has a certain form, a certain meaning, and, most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well.
grammatical
a string of words really does form a sentence of some language
ungrammatrical
string of words does not form a sentence
grammaticality judgement
is a reflection of speakers’ mental grammar, and not a test of their conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules
subject
expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb
object
expression that occurs immediately to the right of the verb
principle of compositionality
underlies the design feature of productivity
lexical expressions
has to be listed in the mental lexicon
phrasal expressions
a linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions. a multi-word linguistic expression.
syntactic properties
properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions
word order
the linear order in which words can occur in some phrasal expression
co-occurrence
the set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expression in a sentence
topicalized
a syntactic process by which a syntactic constituent occurs at the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion
adjuncts
a linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional
syntactic constituent
a group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression; the smaller expressions out of which some larger phrasal expression was constructed in accordance with the phrase structure rules
cleft
a type of sentence that has the general form It is/was X that Y
pro-forms
a reconstructed form of a word
syntactic categories
a group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties. All expressions that belong to the same syntactic category have more or less the same syntactic distribution
syntactic distribution
refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur. If two expressions are interchangeable in all syntactic environments, we say that they have the same syntactic distribution and therefore belong to the same syntactic categoty
noun phases
the name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expression with the same syntactic distribution
determiners
name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc.
count nouns
a noun that can be counted and pluralized
mass nouns
a noun that can not be counted and cannot be pluralized
intransitive verbs
verbs that require no complements
transitive verbs
the name of the syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with an expression of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase
distransitive verbs
the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with two expression of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase
sentential complement verbs
the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with a sentence to their right result in a verb phrase
VP adjuncts
a kind of adjunct that combines with an expression of syntactic category verb phrase with the resulting expression also being of category verb phrase
N adjuncts
a kind of adjunct that combines with an expression of syntactic category noun with the resulting expression also being of category noun
prepositional phrase
the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase
lexicon
a mental repository of linguistic information about words and other lexical expressions including their form and meaning and their morphological and syntactic properties
phrase structure rules
a recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories
phase structure tree
A visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structure rules
ambiguous
can correspond to more than one distinct expression
lexical ambiguity
the phenomenon where a single word is the form of two or more distinct linguistic expressions that differ in meaning or syntactic properties
homophony
the phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or non phrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form
preposition
a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause
adverb
a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc.
adjective
a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.
nouns
a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things common noun
