Introduction to Syntactic Theory Flashcards
What is the function of rules in Language?
The rules in language (e.g., grammar and syntax) dictate how words can be logically combined to form meaningful sentences.
They act as constraint to enable communication
What is the task of a syntactician?
1- Identify the categories
2- We explain the syntactic rules that apply to them.
What is category?
The property of a word, e.g. verb, noun or preposition, that determines its syntactic behaviour.
what are abstract nouns?
Nouns that lack a concrete reference. Peace and democracy
What are nouns?
elements that can be preceded by the article the and often, but not always, refer to some particular individual or entity.
What are verbs?
Verbs are elements that can appear in finite and non-finite forms and often, but not always, refer to some particular event or action.
What is article?
grammatical category that consists of elements, such as THE and A(A), that indicate whether a noun refers to a unique or a non-unique element. The is a definite article and refers to unique elements
What are complementiser?
a grammatical category that consists of elements like that or whether, which makes a clause become an embedded clause
What does syntax dictate?
Which categories can be combined, and which cannot. If two categories can be combined, this holds for all the elements that belong to that category
What is implementation?
A way of turning your insight into a very precise and concrete proposal.
Trying to understand how many categories can be distinguished, and figuring out how they can be distinguished.
What are the possible ways we can distinguish which category a word belongs to?
1- Pronunciation.
2- Meaning
3- Combinatorial possibilities of words
Why can pronunciation and meaning not help in determining the category of a word?
1- there is nothing in the pronunciation that makes it a noun or a verb. Some nouns and verbs have one syllable, and the same sounds used in nouns are also used everywhere.
2- As for meaning, it is a better case, since nouns denote people, verbs denote actions etc. However, there are nouns that do denote actions (war, dance), and nouns that do not refer to people or things (love). And some verbs can be nouns and vise versa ( everybody was dancing well, joan’s dancing was the best)
What are the two diagnostics we can use in the combinatorial possibilities of words?
1- Syntax proper which deals with the behaviour of nouns and verbs. They behave differently when it comes to the syntactic surroundings they occur in. EX: Nouns can be preceded by an article, but not verbs. nouns can be modified by adjectives.
verbs can appear after the infinitive marker TO, which nouns cannot.
2- Word building/morphology,
Nouns and verbs behave differently here too. EX: verbs can be in past tense, nouns can’t. Nouns can be combined by with plural morphemes -s, unless the noun is irregular
Why verbs are verbs, and nouns are nouns?
because a verb behaves grammatically like a verb, a noun behaves in a different way. There is no single exception to this rule
What is a major advantage distinguishing syntactic features from semantic and phonological properties?
it enables us to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical, even if the meaning is odd.
EX: “i drink some coffee” this sentence shows that any element with feature N is acceptable in “i drink…..” “i drink furniture” the meaning is odd, however it is still grammatical (use the cartoon test)
The fact that syntactic rules apply to categories achieves what?
it reduces the number of potential syntactic rules.
What is substitution test?
A test to see whether elements belong to the same category (i.e. share the same feature(s). If two elements can always be substituted for each other (while retaining grammaticality), they belong to the same category.
What are closed and open classes?
1- closed classes: a categorial class with a small number of elements and to which no new elements can easily be added. Their meaning is not always easy to construct because these words have a grammatical function.. EX: AN, THE, A ETC. These words are referred to as functional categories.
2- closed classes: a categorial class with a large number of elements and to which new elements can easily be added. They have a clear meaning and relate to something in the real world, no matter how abstract. These words are referred to as lexical categories
why is it important to introduce open/closed classes?
It is generally harder to provide a meaning for an item from a closed class.
what is the noteworthy property in this generalisation: If two elements X and Y share the same syntactic features, then in every grammatical sentence that contains X you can replace X by Y (and vice versa) and the sentence remains grammatical.
it only cares about the feature of an element (for instance, whether it carries [N] or [V]) and is not concerned with the meaning of elements.
