File 5 Flashcards
Syntax
A component of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions. Also a name for the subfield of linguistics which studies how expressions can combine to form larger expressions.
Linguistic Expressions
A piece of language with a form, a meaning, and syntactic properties.
Compositionality
The notion that the meaning of a phrasal expression is predictable from the meanings of the expressions it contains and how they were syntactically combined.
Grammaticality Judgement
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.
Lexical Expressions
A linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon, e.g. single-word expressions and idioms.
Phrasal Expression
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of expressions. A multi-word linguistic expression.
Syntactic Properties
Properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely, word order and co-occurrence 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.
Topicalized
A syntactic process by which a syntactic constituent occurs the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
Arguments
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in the sentence as well.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Morphosyntax
The name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
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, gender, number, etc.
Syntactic Constituent
A group of linguistic expressions 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.
Conjunts
An argument of a coordinating conjunction such as and or or.