Chapter 5 Syntax Flashcards
Syntax
A component of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions out of smaller expressions.
Grammatical
A term used to describe a sentence that is in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules. When some phrasal expression is constructed in accordance with syntactic rules.
Grammaticality 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.
Ungrammatical
Not in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules.
Complements
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Subject
An expression, typically a noun phrase, that occurs to the left of the verb phrase in an English sentence.
Object
A noun phrase that usually occurs immediately to the right of the verb in English. A noun phrase complement.
Syntactic Properties
Properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely word order and co-occurence properties.
Word Order
The linear order in which words can occur in some phrasal expression. Also, the set of syntactic properties of expressions that dictates how they can be ordered with respect to other expressions.
Topicalization
A syntactic process by which (in English) a syntactic constituent occurs at the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
Pro-forms
A word that can replace a syntactic constituent.
Adjectives
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category. Morphologically consists of words to with the comparative suffix -er or the suffix -ness can be added. Syntactically, the category consists of those expressions that can be noun adjuncts or occur between a determiner and a noun.
Determiners
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc. Syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category.
Count Nouns
In simple terms, a noun that can be counted and pluralized.
Intransitive Verbs
The name of a set of lexical expressions whose syntactic category is verb phrase.
Syntactic Constituent
A group of linguistic expression 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.
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.
Prepositional Phrase
The name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase.
Substitution
In syntax, a constituency test involves replacing a constituent with a single word (or simple phrase), such as a pro-form. In language processing, a production error in which on unit is replace with another.
Phrase Structure Tree
A visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and phrase structure rules.
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.
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.
Nouns
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category.
