Syntax Flashcards
syntax
the study of how words form phrases and sentences
grammar
how to put words together
grammaticality
judgements native speakers make regarding
whether or not a sentence follows their understanding of their
language
grammatical meaning
we understand the whole meaning through the individual
pieces and how they are put together
- compositional
- meaning of words + arrangement = meaning of whole
- overlap between syntax and semantics
parsing
- sentence enters through your ears
- sentence runs through the mental parser, which decodes
the relationship the words and phrases - once the sentence is fully parsed and understood, meaning
appears
graden path sentences
sentences which trick the parser into going for an incorrect interpretation
word classes
what type of word something is
word order
the order in which the words appear
co-occurence
which things typically go together
syntactic distribution
where things usually appear
count nouns
countable, individual objects; can be plural or singular
mass nouns
undifferentiated masses; cannot be pluralized
common nouns
regular nouns; can take determiner
proper nouns
names; cannot take determiner
modal verbs
express something about the probability or time
of action (e.g., will, shall, can, may, must, should, would, could, might)
determiners
words used to express the scrope of a noun (e.g., the, an, that, etc.)
- articles: the, a, an
- quantifiers: some, ever, few, all, most
- demonstratives: that, this, those, these
intransitive
verbs that require only 1 noun phrase
- this NP has to be the subject NP
- E.g., Julia ran. (*ran.)
transitive
verbs that require 2 NPs
- these NPs are subject NP and direct object NP
- E.g., Tucker devoured the pizza. (*Tucker devoured.)
ditransitive
verbs that require 3 NPs
- these NPs are subject NP, direct object NP, and indirect object
- E.g., Sally gave a book to her mom. (*Sally gave a book.)
sentential
verbs that require an entire sentence as their “object”
- E.g., I think (that) Sally gave a book to her mom
arguments
all of the pieces that are required by the verb
- verbs must have X amount of arguments and only that amount
adjuncts
optional pieces that can be added to a sentence to
add information or modify a verb, noun, etc.
- they don’t change the predicate
external argument
the argument that serves as the subject in
the subject-predicate structure
internal argument
arguments within the predicate that are
complements of the verb (i.e., direct and indirect objects)
phrase
chunks of words that act together as a whole
- each phrase has a head, which determines the type of phrase it is
- in english, heads are often first but not always
- each phrase is a constituent
- a unit of words that want to stick together
auxiliary phrase
these phrases must include an auxiliary verb and appear at the
beginning of a VP:
- E.g., I will feed my cat.
- E.g., Tom has spoken Spanish in class.
- these verbs are commonly known as helping verbs
recursion
when something contains an instance of itself
- important facet of language
generativity
the ability to produce
sentences never before said, and to
understand sentences never before heard
- E.g., Tucker said that Ivy said that Sara
said that Jarett said it is cold today
ambiguity
multiple possible meanings from the same sentences
lexical ambiguity
ambiguity caused by the presence of two or more meanings for the same word
- e.g. DUCK!
structural ambiguity
ambiguity caused by the organization of the words in the sentence
