Syntax

Question 1

Iteration

Answer 1

[Anne arrived.] [Ben left.] [Cameron arrived.]

Question 2

Recursion

Answer 2

[Cameron told me [Anne said that [Ben left.]]]

Question 3

Constituents

Answer 3

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)

Question 4

Syntactic Effect of the Passive

Answer 4

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)

Question 5

Analytic or Periphrastic Passives

Answer 5

Passives that involve auxiliary verbs like be, become, get (like in English)

Question 6

Synthetic Passives

Answer 6

Passives formed by adding a suffix to the verb

Question 7

Impersonal Passives

Answer 7

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)

Question 8

Pseudopassives or Prepositional Passives

Answer 8

The passive verb does not correspond to the direct object of the active verb. Instead it corresponds to the complement of a preposition

Question 9

Antipassive

Answer 9

The participant role normally mapped to the object is either not realised at all, or expressed as an oblique

Question 10

Clause

Answer 10

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)

Question 11

Declaratives

Answer 11

Making assertions

Question 12

Interrogatives

Answer 12

Asking questions

Question 13

Imperatives

Answer 13

Giving commands

Question 14

Exclamatives

Answer 14

Expressing an exclamation

Question 15

Clause types in the subordinate clause

Answer 15

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.

Question 16

Heading a root clause

Answer 16

only finite verbs

Question 17

Purpose Adjuncts

Answer 17

“She opened the door TO ventilate the house.”

Question 18

Reason Adjuncts

Answer 18

“She wrote a letter BECAUSE they were angry.”

Question 19

Concessive Modifiers/Adjuncts

Answer 19

“Lara left, THOUGH it was still quite early.”

Question 20

Conditional Modifiers/Adjuncts

Answer 20

The bartended WHO served me spilled my beer

Question 21

Restrictive Relative

Answer 21

“Spanish people who have red hair usually have some Celtic ancestry.”

Question 22

Nonrestrictive Relative

Answer 22

“Spanish people, who have red hair, usually have some Celtic ancestry.”

• false sentence, implies that all Spanish people have red hair.

Question 23

Modals and the VP they take

Answer 23

Modals like may, might, can etc. require that their complement VP be headed by a bare infinitive.

“The teenager may WRITE a novel.”

Question 24

Perfect Auxiliaries and the VP they take

Answer 24

The perfect auxiliary ‘have’ requires that it’s complement VP be headed by a past participle.

“The teenager has WRITTEN a novel.”

Question 25

Various Verbs and the VP they take

Answer 25

Verbs of various kinds select specific types of complements - there is SELECTIONAL REQUIREMENTS specific to each particular head (verb, preposition etc.)

Question 26

Linguistic Hypothesis

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

Merge

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

Topicalisation/fronting

Answer 28

When a phrase is re-merged at the beginning of a clause.

Question 29

Unbounded/Distance Movement

Answer 29

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.

Question 30

WH-Interrogatives

Answer 30

“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)