Chapter 5 Vocabulary

Question 1

Syntax

Answer 1

How sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words.

Question 2

Linguistic expressions

Answer 2

Just a piece of language that has a certain form, meaning, and most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well.

Question 3

Grammaticality judgment

Answer 3

A reflection of speakers’ mental grammar, and not a test of the conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules.

Question 4

Principle of compositionality

Answer 4

Underlies the design feature of productivity.

Question 5

Lexical expressions

Answer 5

a linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon

Question 6

phrasal expressions

Answer 6

a linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions

Question 7

syntactic properties

Answer 7

Properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions.

Question 8

word order

Answer 8

The linear order in which words can occur in phrasal expression.

Question 9

complements

Answer 9

A non-subject argument of some expression.

Question 10

Adjuncts

Answer 10

A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called a modifier

Question 11

agreement

Answer 11

The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.

Question 12

cleft

Answer 12

A type of sentence that has the general form. can be used as a constituency test

Question 13

modifiers

Answer 13

Also known as adjunct

Question 14

determiners

Answer 14

The name of lexical category an a syntactic category that consists of expressions.

Question 15

morphosyntax

Answer 15

the name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single comment of grammar

Question 16

syntactic constituent

Answer 16

A group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression.

Question 17

lexicon

Answer 17

a mental repository of linguistic information about words an other lexical expressions, including their form and meaning and their morphological and syntactic properties.

Question 18

substitution

Answer 18

a constituency test that involves replacing a constituent with a single word such as a pro-form.

Question 19

pro-forms

Answer 19

a word that can replace a syntactic constituent.

Question 20

Syntactic categories

Answer 20

A group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties.

Question 21

syntactic distribution

Answer 21

Refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur.

Question 22

noun

Answer 22

the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category.

Question 23

prepositional phrase

Answer 23

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a precession and a noun phrase.

Question 24

phrase structure rules

Answer 24

a recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories

Question 25

phrases structure tree

Answer 25

a visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structure rules.

Question 26

transitive verbs

Answer 26

The name of a a 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; a verb that needs a noun phrase complement.

Question 27

structural ambiguity

Answer 27

the phenomenon where a single string of words is the form of more than one distance phrasal expression.

Question 28

VP adjuncts

Answer 28

Name of syntactic category that consists of all expressions that if combined with a noun phrase to their left, result in a sentence.