Chp 5 Syntax

Question 1

syntax

Answer 1

has to do with how sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words

Question 2

linguistic expression

Answer 2

just a piece of language; it has a certain form, meaning, and syntactic properties.

Question 3

grammaticality judgment

Answer 3

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

Question 4

principle of compositionality

Answer 4

underlies the design feature of productivity

Question 5

syntactic properties

Answer 5

has to do with the word order: how expressions allowed to be ordered with respect to one another

Question 6

word order

Answer 6

the most obvious aspect of syntactic well-formedness, examples: sally walked, walked sally. In which subjects precede verbs which in turn precede objects is reffered to as SVO (subject-verb-object)

Question 7

co-occurrence

Answer 7

syntactic properties, being able to dictate your expressions and constructed a whole sentence

Question 8

a.) arguments

Answer 8

other expressions are required to occur in that sentence as well.

1. Sally devoured an apple
2. Sally devoured
3. Devoured an apple

Question 9

b.) adjuncts

Answer 9

there are certain kinds of expressions whose occurrence in a sentence is purely optional, not only are they optional, but it is also possible to add as many of them as you like without winding up with a non-sentence.

Question 10

c) agreement

Answer 10

expressions can have concerns the particular morphological form of an expression influences its co-occurrence requirements. Distinct expressions, grammatical features, phenomenon features

Question 11

syntactic constituent

Answer 11

of a phrasal expression are the smaller expressions that form a syntactic constituent as being tightly combined together, more tightly than with other expressions in the same sentence.

Question 12

cleft

Answer 12

kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced (or moved) to the left. The general form of X and Y.

Question 13

pro-forms

Answer 13

pronouns are the most familiar pro-forms but there are others as well. Proverbs (so) (see)

Question 14

syntactic categories

Answer 14

similar but distinct from the traditional notions of parts of speech or lexical categories, consists of a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties they are usually interchangeable in a sentence, you can substitute them for one another and still have a grammatical sentence

Question 15

mass nouns

Answer 15

cannot be counted and cannot (normally) be pluralized

Question 16

transitive verbs

Answer 16

form their own syntactic category

Question 17

ditransitive verb

Answer 17

verbs that need more than one compliment to be a VP (e.g. gave)

Question 18

sentential complement verb

Answer 18

verbs that need a S complement to become a VP (e.g. thought)

Question 19

prepositional phrase

Answer 19

PP, P and NP, same distribution as Adv, or occurs inside NPs (same distribution as N)

Question 20

constructed grammar

Answer 20

a linguist’s theory of a native speaker’s mental grammar

Question 21

lexicon

Answer 21

list of words/morphemes in the language and their syntactic properties, assigning lexical expressions to syntactic categories, has selectional requirements and lexical category information

Question 22

phrase structure rules

Answer 22

captures patterns of syntactic combination, same form as lexical entries but only consist of syntactic categories (e.g. S → NP VP), rules for combining words to make larger phrases and sentences (forming complex constituents)

Question 23

phrase structure tree

Answer 23

used to display the construction of a sentence from lexical expressions

Question 24

ambiguity

Answer 24

expressions can combine in different ways, creating distinct phrases that have exactly the same form

Question 25

ambiguous

Answer 25

a linguistic form can correspond to more than one distinct expression

Question 26

lexical ambiguity/homophony

Answer 26

same form, different meaning and syntactic properties

Question 27

structural ambiguity

Answer 27

a string of words can have two lexical categories in the context of the sentence (e.g. The cop saw the man with the binoculars.)

Question 28

head of a phrase

Answer 28

the phrase’s core meaning, selects its argument

Question 29

syntactic typology

Answer 29

variation of word order

Question 30

obligatory co-occurrence

Answer 30

some morphological or syntactic items are required in particular syntactic environments

Question 31

optional co-occurrence

Answer 31

some syntactic items are allowed, but not required in particular contexts

Question 32

topicalized

Answer 32

sentence is dependent on context (e.g. answering a question)

Question 33

modifiers

Answer 33

modifies the meaning of whatever the adjunct is attributed to

Question 34

morpho-syntax

Answer 34

the morphological form of an expression has consequences for its syntactic properties

Question 35

(constituency test)

Answer 35

if a string of words answers a question based on the sentence, the sentence is a syntactic constituent

Question 36

coordination (constituency test)

Answer 36

construction of a sentence with “and” to determine if the expression is a syntactic constituent, minimal changes (such as number agreement) are acceptable, but the sentence should stay close to the original

Question 37

conjuncts

Answer 37

arguments of coordinating conjunctions (e.g. and, or), can be switched around and remain grammatical

Question 38

sentence

Answer 38

syntactic category

Question 39

noun

Answer 39

nouns can occur with determiners (NPs can’t)

Question 40

noun phrase

Answer 40

personal pronouns, proper names, other expressions with the same distribution, can be replaced with a pronoun