Syntax Flashcards
Causative
making (causing) someone to do something
ex. I make him wash his clothes
-requires: person doing the making, “make”, person doing the action, the action
What is syntax?
the rules and principles governing the sentence structure of a language
Syntactic properties can include…
word order, restrictions on what needs to appear with what (inflectional morphology, co-occurrence restrictions)
Word order
the order of syntactic constituents of a language
ex. english=SVO, japanese=SOV
Intransitive verbs
verb doesn’t need a subject (in english)
ex. jumps/dances
Ditransitive verbs
verb requires a second subject (in english)
ex. the dinosaur devoured the cat
Transitive verbs
verb only needs one object
ex. the dinosaur slept
Constituents
a group of words that belong together in a sentence (form a syntactic unit)
-sentence itself is a constituent as well
ex. I like eggs and ham. con: eggs and ham
NOT a con: eggs and
Question and Answer (constituency tests)
can you ask a question in such a way that the group of words in question can form a grammatical answer?
ex. S: sam likes eggs and ham. Q. what does sam like? A. eggs and ham
Substitution (constituency tests)
can you substitute the group of words with a pronoun/”do so”/”do that/”that way”?
ex. S: sam likes eggs and ham
1. sam likes them
Clefting (constituency tests)
can you move the constituent to the left of the sentence?
ex. sam likes eggs and ham
1. it is eggs and ham that sam likes
Proposition
the claim expressed by a sentence
Truth Value
the ability of a sentence to be true/false
Truth Conditions
conditions necessary for a proposition to be true
Entailment
If the truth of Proposition A guarantees the truth of another Proposition B, then P.A entails P.B
OR if sentence A entails sentence B, sentence A cannot be true without B being true as well
ex. all dogs bark (A), Sarah’s dog barks (B)
Mutual Entailment
when two propositions entail each other (two words that are synonymous)
ex. Sarah has a female sibling, Sarah has a sister
Principle of Compositionality
the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to combine them
TLDR; must pay attention to rules AND words
Idioms
expressions which do not conform to the principle of compositionality; the meaning may be unrelated to the meaning of its parts
Semantic Roles are determined by….
the verb
Agent (semantic role)
the one who deliberately performs an action
ex. /Jane/ melted the ice with a blowtorch
/John/ jumped
/James/ shouted at the world
Theme (semantic role)
the one or thing which undergoes an action; often results in a change of state/shape/position
ex. John melted /the ice/ with a blowtorch
/the ice/ was melted by Jane with a blowtorch
/John/ fell
Sally threw /the ball/ to Mark
Experiencer (semantic role)
the one who perceives/experiences something; usually accompanies a verb dealing with the senses
ex. /Lucretia/ saw the bicycle
it was /Bill/ who smelled the bacon first
the explosion was heard by /everyone/
Goal (semantic role)
place to which an action is directed
ex. no one saw the robbers breaking /into the house/
sally threw the ball /to john/
put the glass /on the table/
Instrument (semantic role)
the means by which an action is performed
ex. dad cleaned the floor /with a mop/
the customer ate his pizza /with a fork/
Syntactic Categories
a group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties; all expressions that belong to the same syntactic category have more or less the same syntactic distribution (can occur in more or less the same place in a sentence)
ex. THE CAT and GIZMO
sally likes the cat/sally likes gizmo
the cat is sleeping/gizmo is sleeping
Noun categories
noun, noun phrase
Preposition categories
preposition, prep. phrase
Verb categories
intransitive verb, transitive verb, ditransitive verb, verb phrase
