Syntax Flashcards
Syntax
The component of language that arranges words into phrases and sentences. The principles of syntax account for the grammaticality of sentences, their hierarchical structure, their word order, et cetera. That is, syntax is the study of how sentences are structured.
Morpheme
The smallest unit of linguistic meaning or function, e.g sheepdogs contains three morphemes, sheep, dog and the function morpheme for plural, s.
Morphology
The study of the structure of words; the component of the grammar that includes the rules of word formation.
Constituent
A constituent is a unit of internal syntactic structure. That is any group of words functioning together as a unit.
A syntactic unit in a tree diagram, e.g. the girl is a noun phrase constituent in the sentence The boy loves the girl.
Constituent structure
The hierarchically arranged syntactic units, such as noun phrase and verb phrase, that underlie every sentence.
Phrasal category
The class of syntactic categories that comprises the highest-level categories, including NP, VP,AdjP, PP and AdvP. See also lexical category functional category.
Lexical category
A general term for the word-level syntactic categories of noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition.
Constituency tests: movement
If you can move a group of words, they are functioning as a unit and this is good evidence that they are a constituent.
Canonical positions
In a neutral English sentence, the subject usually precedes the verb and the object follows the verb. We call the preverbal position of the subject and the postverbal position of the object their canonical positions. We can move things out of their canonical positions for particular effects.
e.g. [preverbal position of the subject] - The news, when it arrives, he takes well enough
[Postverbal, canonical position] - When it arrives, he takes the news well enough.
The cleft (marked word orders as they are less neutral because they carry some kind of communicative effect)
When one constituent is promoted to the foreground while the rest of the original sentence remains in the background
Cleft formula
It is/was X who/ that y. (y is remainder of the original sentence)
- if a string of words can replace the variable X in the cleft formula and the sentence that we create is a grammatical sentence of English, then it’s evidence that the string of words that replaced X is a constituent.
Test sentence for cleft formula: The student of linguistics bought a brand new car in the holidays
- we first select some string of words in the original sentence and test to see whether that string of words is a constituent.
E.g. [The student of linguistics] bought a brand new car in the holidays.
- cleft applied
= ‘It’ ‘was’ [the student of linguistics] ‘that’ bought a brand new car in the holidays.
