Syntactic categories Flashcards
What is syntax?
Syntax is a set of rules, principles, and processes which govern the structure of the sentences in a a given language, usually including word order. The term syntax is also used to refer to the study of these principles and processes.
Parts of speech?
The most common parts of speech are verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions. Parts of speech tell us how a word is going to function in the sentence.
How do we define parts of speech?
Defining parts of speech depends on where the words appear in the sentence and what kinds of affixes they take.
What are distributional tests?
The syntactic category of a word or a phrase is determined by its position in the sentence and by its morphology, and not by its meaning. There are two distributional test for determining the syntactic category: morphological distribution and syntactic distribution.
What is morphological distribution?
Morphological distribution refers to the kinds of affixes and other morphology a word takes.
What is syntactic distribution?
Syntactic distribution refers to what other words are nearby.
What is complementary distribution?
If two categories are in complementary distribution, they never appear in the same environment or in the same context, because they are subtypes of larger class.
Types of syntactic categories?
Open syntactic categories are categories that allow new members and coinage (verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs)
Closed syntactic categories are categories which do not allow new coinage (determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, complementizers, tense, negation, prepositions)
Lexical syntactic categories are categories that express the content of a sentence (nouns with pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)
Functional syntactic categories are categories which express the grammatical information in a sentence, they hold a sentence as a kind of glue (prepositions, conjunctions, tense, negation, complementizers, determiners)
Subcategories?
Determiners: stand at the beginning of a noun phrase. This class contains a number of subcategories.
Articles, deictic articles, cardinal numbers, quantifiers, possessive pronouns, some wh- questions.
Prepositions: appear before nouns or noun phrases.
Complementizers: connect structures together by embedding one clause inside another and not keeping them on an equal level. (that, whether, if,for)
Conjunctions: connect structures together but on the equal level.
Tense:
Auxiliaries: have/has/had, am/is/are, do
Modals
The non-finite tense marker to
The tense suffixes -ed, -s
Negation: a special category including only one member not.
What is a predicate?
A predicate defines the relation between the individuals being talked about and facts about them, as well as the relation between the arguments.
What are arguments and argument structure?
Argument is an entity participating in a predicate relation.
Argument structure is the number of arguments that the predicate requires, this is also known as valency.
Transitivity?
The arguments following the verb determine its transitivity.
Intransitive: a predicate which takes only one argument.
Transitive: a predicate which takes two arguments.
Ditransitive: a predicate which takes three arguments.
Semantic and syntactic valency?
The syntactic valency of a predicate is the number of arguments needed for a sentence to be grammatical.
The semantic valency of a predicate is the number of arguments for intuitive semantic completeness.
What is a cognate object?
A cognate object is an object closely related, derivationally or semantically, to the predicate which governs it
