Chapter 5 Vocabulary Flashcards
Syntax
How sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words.
Linguistic expressions
Just a piece of language that has a certain form, meaning, and most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well.
Grammaticality judgment
A reflection of speakers’ mental grammar, and not a test of the conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules.
Principle of compositionality
Underlies the design feature of productivity.
Lexical expressions
a linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon
phrasal expressions
a linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions
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 phrasal expression.
complements
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Adjuncts
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called a modifier
agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.
cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form. can be used as a constituency test
modifiers
Also known as adjunct
determiners
The name of lexical category an a syntactic category that consists of expressions.
morphosyntax
the name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single comment of grammar
syntactic constituent
A group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression.
lexicon
a mental repository of linguistic information about words an other lexical expressions, including their form and meaning and their morphological and syntactic properties.
substitution
a constituency test that involves replacing a constituent with a single word such as a pro-form.
pro-forms
a word that can replace a syntactic constituent.
Syntactic categories
A group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties.
syntactic distribution
Refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur.
noun
the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category.
prepositional phrase
the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a precession and a noun phrase.
phrase structure rules
a recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories
phrases structure tree
a visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structure rules.
transitive verbs
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.
structural ambiguity
the phenomenon where a single string of words is the form of more than one distance phrasal expression.
VP adjuncts
Name of syntactic category that consists of all expressions that if combined with a noun phrase to their left, result in a sentence.
