Syntax

Question 1

What is syntax

Answer 1

principles and rules for organization of words into clauses into sentences

Question 2

Syntactic constituency

Answer 2

smaller expressions that a phrase is structured out of

groupings of consecutive words that hang together

Question 3

What determines if a group of words is a constituent

Answer 3

1. they can move around together in a sentence
2. they often have one word substitutes
3. may stand alone as answers to questions about the sentence

Question 4

What is the constituent in this sentence: The cat was sleeping on the desk

Answer 4

on the desk

Question 5

Syntactic Categories

Answer 5

A set of expressions that have the same syntactic properties and syntactic distribution

Example:
Jen likes the cat
Jen likes fluffy
Fluffy and the cat are in the same syntactic categories
fluffy and cat are not in the same syntactic category