Syntax Flashcards
Iteration
[Anne arrived.] [Ben left.] [Cameron arrived.]
Recursion
[Cameron told me [Anne said that [Ben left.]]]
Constituents
Can have the same distribution in a sentence (basis of the substitution in English - other languages have different ways of determining whether a phrase is a constituent of a sentence)
Syntactic Effect of the Passive
The participant role that would normally be mapped to subject is either:
- no longer realised in the sentence at all (‘short’ passive)
- realised as a PP headed by the preposition ‘by’ (‘long’ passive)
Analytic or Periphrastic Passives
Passives that involve auxiliary verbs like be, become, get (like in English)
Synthetic Passives
Passives formed by adding a suffix to the verb
Impersonal Passives
When the intransitive verb is passivised (in this case, there is no participant role to map to the subject position. Either there is no subject at all, or we find an ‘expletive’/’dummy’ subject. Also possible with transitive verbs in some languages)
Pseudopassives or Prepositional Passives
The passive verb does not correspond to the direct object of the active verb. Instead it corresponds to the complement of a preposition
Antipassive
The participant role normally mapped to the object is either not realised at all, or expressed as an oblique
Clause
Syntactic unit that generally consists of a subject and predicate
“The warden said the car was illegal.”
- verb ‘said’ heads one clause (main/root clause)
- verb ‘was’ heads the other (embedded clause)
Declaratives
Making assertions
Interrogatives
Asking questions
Imperatives
Giving commands
Exclamatives
Expressing an exclamation
Clause types in the subordinate clause
All except imperatives can be embedded in a sub clause.
- Don’t come!
- Not to come!*
- He said that don’t come!*
- He said not come. (no longer the form of an imperative clause.
Heading a root clause
only finite verbs
Purpose Adjuncts
“She opened the door TO ventilate the house.”
Reason Adjuncts
“She wrote a letter BECAUSE they were angry.”
Concessive Modifiers/Adjuncts
“Lara left, THOUGH it was still quite early.”
Conditional Modifiers/Adjuncts
The bartended WHO served me spilled my beer
Restrictive Relative
“Spanish people who have red hair usually have some Celtic ancestry.”
Nonrestrictive Relative
“Spanish people, who have red hair, usually have some Celtic ancestry.”
- false sentence, implies that all Spanish people have red hair.
Modals and the VP they take
Modals like may, might, can etc. require that their complement VP be headed by a bare infinitive.
“The teenager may WRITE a novel.”
Perfect Auxiliaries and the VP they take
The perfect auxiliary ‘have’ requires that it’s complement VP be headed by a past participle.
“The teenager has WRITTEN a novel.”
Various Verbs and the VP they take
Verbs of various kinds select specific types of complements - there is SELECTIONAL REQUIREMENTS specific to each particular head (verb, preposition etc.)
Linguistic Hypothesis
Aspects of syntactic structure are not always specific to particular languages - may be general facts about how ALL languages work.
- for example, a universal fact about phrases is that the category of a phrase is determined by the head of a phrase.
Merge
A hypothesis that the structure of a sentence is made possible by the following general procedure:
- Take a word out the lexicon.
- Take another word out.
- Combine them into a piece of structure that respects the structure of the language.
- Repeat.
Topicalisation/fronting
When a phrase is re-merged at the beginning of a clause.
Unbounded/Distance Movement
When the sentence does not set any limits as to how many clauses the phrase can move out of on its way up the syntactic tree.
WH-Interrogatives
“They will order which articles?”
“Which articles will they order?”
Will = the highest auxiliary in the clause remerged (local movement)
Which articles = (long distance movement)
