syntax Flashcards
Syntax
a set of rules for or an analysis of the syntax of a language.
grammar
the whole system and structure of a language or of languages in general, usually taken as consisting of syntax and morphology (including inflections) and sometimes also phonology and semantics.
constituents
a linguistic part of a larger sentence, phrase, or clause.
Phrases
a group of words which act together as a grammatical unit.
pronominalisation
the process or fact of using a pronoun instead of another sentence constituent (such as a noun or noun phrase)
pro-form
a word or phrase that can take the place of another word (or word group) in a sentence.
wh-pronoun
We use interrogative pronouns to ask questions. They are: who, which, whom, what and whose. These are also known as wh-words.
movement
Another such test for constituency
coordination test
Coordination is one of the traditional diagnostic tests for constituent structure. If a string x is able to conjoin with a similar string, this is taken to mean that x is a constituent, while if this is not possible, it suggests that x is not a constituent.
gapping
is a type of ellipsis that occurs in the non-initial conjuncts of coordinate structures.
sentence-fragment test
A sentence fragment is a group of words that cannot stand alone as a sentence because it does not express a complete thought.
head
is the key word that determines the nature of a phrase (in contrast to any modifiers or determiners
prepositional
phrases
a modifying phrase consisting of a preposition and its object.
adjective phrases
An adjective phrase is a group of words headed by an adjective that describes a noun or a pronoun. Interactive Examples of Adjective Phrases.
verb phrases
the part of a sentence containing the verb and any direct or indirect object, but not the subject.
adverb phrases
is simply a group of two or more words that function as an adverb in a sentence.
projections
Syntacticians say that the
head projects its properties onto the phrase as a whole (which is also the reason
why phrases are often called projections of their head).
word-classes,
English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.
syntactic categories,
What is syntactic category?
A syntactic category is a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties: word order, and cooccurrence requirements
parts-of-speech
a category to which a word is assigned in accordance with its syntactic functions. In English the main parts of speech are noun, pronoun, adjective, determiner, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
lexical categories.
A lexical category is a syntactic category for elements that are part of the lexicon of a language. These elements are at the word level.
determiners
a modifying word that determines the kind of reference a noun or noun group has, for example a, the, every.
phrase structure rules
re a type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language’s syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957
subordinate clauses.
a clause, typically introduced by a conjunction, that forms part of and is dependent on a main clause