Syntax

Question 1

syntax

Answer 1

has to do with how sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words

Question 2

linguistic expressions

Answer 2

a piece of language– it has a certain form, certain meaning, and some syntactic properties as well

Question 3

grammatical

Answer 3

when a string of words really does form a sentence of some language

Question 4

ungrammatical

Answer 4

some string of words does not form a sentence

Question 5

subject

Answer 5

the expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb

Question 6

object

Answer 6

the expression that occurs immediately to the right of the verb

Question 7

principle of compositionality

Answer 7

the fact that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined

Question 8

lexical expressions

Answer 8

knowing a language to then produce and understand an infinite number of sentences because you know the meanings

Question 9

phrasal expressions

Answer 9

a fixed or semi-fixed sequence of two or more co-occurring but not necessarily contiguous words with a cohesive meaning or function that is not easily discernible by decoding the individual words alone

Question 10

syntactic properties

Answer 10

determine how we combine lexical expressions to form sentences

Question 11

word order

Answer 11

the linear order of words in a phrasal expression or sentence

Question 12

co-occurance

Answer 12

refers to an above-chance frequency of occurrence of two terms

Question 13

argument

Answer 13

an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries

Question 14

complements

Answer 14

non-subject arguments

Question 15

adjuncts

Answer 15

certain kinds of expressions whose occurrence in a sentence is purely optional

Question 16

agreement

Answer 16

distinct expressions in a sentence may be required to have the same value for some grammatical feature, in which case we say that they agree with respect to that feature

Question 17

morpho-syntax

Answer 17

morphology and syntax are often seen as tightly related components of grammar

Question 18

syntactic constituent

Answer 18

the smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed

Question 19

cleft

Answer 19

a kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced to the left

Question 20

substitution

Answer 20

involves replacing a constituent with a single word

Question 21

pro-forms

Answer 21

a word or lexical unit that is dependent for its meaning on reference to some other part of the context or sentence in which it occurs

Question 22

syntactic categories

Answer 22

consists of a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties; they have approximately the same word order and co-occurrence requirements

Question 23

syntactic distribution

Answer 23

refers to the arrangement of words and other units of language in clauses and phrases and the relationships that obtain between them

Question 24

noun phrases

Answer 24

consists of personal pronouns, proper names, and any other expressions that have the same distribution

Question 25

mass nouns

Answer 25

can occur without a determiner and can be replaced with a pronoun; cannot be counted and cannot be pluralized

Question 26

count nouns

Answer 26

being able to be counted; can be pluralized

Question 27

verb phrase

Answer 27

the part of a sentence containing the verb and any direct or indirect object, but not the subject

Question 28

intransitive verbs

Answer 28

an action verb with no direct object

Question 29

transitive verbs

Answer 29

action verb with a direct object

Question 30

ditransitive verbs

Answer 30

a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a theme and a recipient

Question 31

sentential complement verbs

Answer 31

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with a sentence to their right result in a verb phrase; a verb that needs a sentence as its complement

Question 32

VP adjuncts

Answer 32

adverbs combine with a VP to form an expression of category VP

Question 33

prepositional phrase

Answer 33

a modifying phrase consisting of a preposition and its object

Question 34

lexical entry

Answer 34

a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words that forms the basic elements of a language’s lexicon; consists of a syntactic category name followed by an arrow followed by a word

Question 35

phrase structure rules

Answer 35

type of rewrite rule used to describe a given language’s syntax and are closely associated with the early stages of transformational grammar

Question 36

phrase structure tree

Answer 36

a structural representation of a sentence in the form of an inverted tree, with each node of the tree labeled according to the phrasal constituent it represents

Question 37

ambiguous

Answer 37

linguistic forms can correspond to more than one distinct expression

Question 38

lexical ambiguity/homophony

Answer 38

a single (phonological) word corresponds to distinct expression that differ in meaning, syntactic properties, or both

Question 39

structural ambiguity

Answer 39

the prepositional phrase can be either a VP adjunct or a noun adjunct

Question 40

preposition

Answer 40

a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause