Module 5 Syntax Vocabulary Flashcards
Syntax
the syntax of English, to see how sentences in this language are structured. The study of syntax is the investigation of the parts sentences consist of and their connections and dependencies.
Constituents or phrases
In analogy to structural units in phonology and morphology, we will call syntactic units constituents, or, in more syntax-specific terminology, phrases.
pronominalisation
Pronominalisation is a test to prove constituent status. Substitution of a constituent by a pronoun. “if you can replace a string of words by a pronoun, this string must be a constituent.”
‘pro-phrases’ or ‘pro-forms’
Pronoun
Movement test
If a string of words can be moved to other sentential positions, it is proof of the string’s being a constituent. This test works nicely for [to the station] and [every morning], but not really for [many people] and [will go]
Coordination test
A third constituency test is the coordination test, according to which it is only constituents that can be coordinated by the coordinating conjunction and.This conjunction has the property of combining only constituents of the same kind. Such constitutents can be simple words (black and white, night and day, twist and shout, up and down), but also phrases[Many people] and [my friends]
‘mother’ and ‘sister’ nodes
A mother node is defined as the node immediately above a given node, and sister nodes are nodes that share the same mother node in a tree.
Syntactic or structural ambiguity
Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity,[1] amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure.
Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure underlying the word order therein. In other words, a sentence is syntactically ambiguous when a reader or listener can reasonably interpret one sentence as having more than one possible structure.
NP’s
Noun phrases. Phrases headed by a noun.
PP’s
Prepositional Phrases. Modifying phrase consisting of a preposition and its object.
AP’s
Adjective phrases. An adjective phrase is a phrase the head of which is an adjective, e.g. fond of steak, very happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective can initiate the phrase, conclude the phrase, or appear in a medial position.
VPs
Verb phrases. The part of a sentence containing the verb and any direct or indirect object, but not the subject.
ADVPs
Adverb phrases. An adverbial phrase is a group of words that refines the meaning of a verb, adjective, or adverb. Similar to adverbs, adverbial phrases modify other words by explaining why, how, where, or when an action occurred.
Head
We will call the most important element of a phrase its HEAD and name the phrases after their heads.
Projections of the head
Phrases are often called projections of their head. Syntacticians say that the head projects its properties onto the phrase as a whole.
Word-class
Syntactic categories of adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc. Generally, there are three types of criteria that are used to find out about the word-class of a given word: semantic, morphological, and syntactic.