Chapter 5 Flashcards
Syntax
How sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words
Linguistic Expression
A piece of language
grammatical
When a string of words forms a sentence in some language, ie syntactically well-formed
Principle of compositionality
The meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined
grammaticality judgment.
Native speakers of a given language uniquely qualified to decide if a string of words is grammatically correct in their native langauge.
Topicalized sentence
A syntactic constituent occurs at the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
Creates a VSO word order
Argument
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in that sentence as well. If the occurrence of an expression X in a sentence requires the occurrence of an expression Y in that sentence, we say that Y is an argument of X.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
adjunct
optional expression to describe a noun, also known as modifiers.
Types of adjuncts
Attributive adjective: Small dog, small furry dog
Adjunct modifying a grammatically correct existing sentence: Sally’s cat was sleeping (on the desk)
Agreement
Expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender.
morphosyntax.
syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
syntactic constituent
smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed. Sally went to France (In July). Sally devoured (an apple).
Cleft constituent test
A constituent is displaced, or moved to the left.
constituent substitution test
smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed
Pro-form constituent test
A word (e.g., a pronoun) that can replace a syntactic constituent. The cat (she).. On the desk (there)
Syntactic category
a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties; that is, they have approximately the same word order and co-occurrence requirements
Syntactic Distribution
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 category
Sentence (S)
A syntactic category that consists of all phrasal expressions that can grammatically occur in Sally thinks that ______.Edition.
Noun Phrases (NP)
consists of personal pronouns (he, she, you, it, we, etc.), proper names, and any other expressions that have the same distribution.
Count nouns
Nouns that are able to be counted or pluralized. (one cat, five cats, cats, desks) Singular from, must have determiner.
Mass nouns
cannot be counted, and not normally pluralized. ex: advice, gravel. Can occur without a determiner.
Demonstrative determiners
this, that, these, those
Possessive determiners
my, your, his, her, our etc
Quantificational determiners
a, some, the, every, all few, most etc
Determiner
Any expression that can be combined with a noun to its right to form an expression of a category NP. “some” is a determiner of “some cat.”
Adjectives (adj)
Occur between a determiner and a noun in an NP
Verb Phrase (VP)
Expressions, that when combined with NP on the left will result in a sentence.
Intransitive verbs
Verbs that require not complements, in the VP category still though.
transitive verbs (TV)
Verbs that require a NP complement to form a VP, such as “liked”
ditransitive verbs (DTV)
syntactic category if combined with two expressions of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase. A verb that needs two noun phrase complements. Sally “gave” Bob (what?) a book. Bob and book, were needed for “gave.”
Sentential Complement Verb
syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with a sentence to their right result in a verb phrase; a verb that needs a sentence as its complement.
Adverb (Adv)
syntactic category that consists of expressions such as quickly, well, furiously, etc. Syntactically, adverbs can be verb phrase adjuncts.
VP adjuncts
adverbs combine with a VP to form an expression of category VP,
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 (PP)
syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase. Can be verb phrase adjuncts or noun adjuncts.
Preposition (P)
lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as of, down, on, over, under, in, for, from, of, at with, etc.
Lexical entry
consists of a syntactic category name followed by an arrow followed by a word. Or use {..,…,…} to the right of the arrow for multiple entries
Phrase Structure rules
used to capture patterns of syntactic combination. They are similar in form to lexical entries, except that they contain only names of syntactic categories; they do not contain any actual linguistic forms.
Phrase Structure tree
A visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structure rules.
Ambiguity
when the same expressions can combine in different ways, resulting in distinct phrases that nevertheless have exactly the same form. Words like bank (BofA or river) or walk (they walk, I went for a walk) have different meaning based on syntax in sentence.
Homophony
two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form, i.e., sound the same, but have different meaning
Structural Ambiguity
a single string of words (or morphemes) is the form of more than one distinct phrasal expression (or word). Arises because the same expressions can combine differently syntactically, resulting in distinct phrases that happen to have the same form.
