Chapter 5 Syntax Flashcards
Adjunct
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional: also called a modifier.
Adverb
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as quickly, well, furiously, etc.Syntactically, adverbs can be verb phrase adjuncts.
Agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence (e.g. a verb and its subject) must be inflectional marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.
Argumen
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence of 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 the sentence, we say that Y is an argument of X.
Cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form It is/ was X that Y, e.g. It was Sally that wanted to meet. Can be used as a constituency test.
Complement
A non subject argument of some expression.
Compositionality
The principle of compositionality underlies the design feature of productivity.
Constituent
Reveal the syntactic of the sentence; in other words, they show how the sentence was built out of smaller expressions.
Conjunct
An argument of a coordinating conjunction such as and or, or.
Co-Occurrence
The set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence.
Distransitive Verb
The name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that 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.
Expression
A linguistic expression is just a piece of language it has certain form( e.g.what it sounds like), a certain meaning, and , most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well. These syntactic properties determine how the expression can combine with other expressions.
Grammatically judgment
An instance of a native speaker of some language deciding whether some string of words corresponds to a syntactically well-formed or grammatical phrasal expression in their native language.
Intransitive Verb
The name for the set of lexical expressions whose syntactic category is verb phrase.
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.
Lexical Entry
A representation of a lexical expression and its linguistic properties within a descriptive grammar of some language. A collection of lexical entries constitutes the lexicon. A lexical entry has the form f- X, Where f is the form of some particular lexical expression, and X is its syntactic category.