Syntax Ch. 5 Flashcards
Syntax
The component of grammar that deals with how words and phrases are all linguistic expressions
Linguistic Expression
A piece of language in a certain form, meaning, and syntactic properties
Grammatical
A syntactically well-formed sentence in some language
Ungrammatical
A syntactically ill-formed sentence
Grammaticality Judgment
A reflection of speakers’ mental grammar
Subject
The expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb
Object
The expression that usually occurs to the right of the verb
Principle of Compositionality
Underlies the design feature of productivity
Lexical Expressions
Words
Phrasal Expressions
Multiword syntactical combinations
Word Order
How expressions are ordered
Co-occurrence
The simultaneous occurrence of expressions in a sentence
Argument
The event that an occurrence of an expression in a sentence necessitates the occurrence of another expression
Complements
Non-subject arguments
Adjuncts
Expressions whose occurrence in a sentence is optional
Modifiers
Sometimes called adjuncts, adjectives that modify the meaning of a word
Agreement
Strict requirements regarding the kind of argument that an expression can have regarding the combination of grammatical features
Syntactic Consituent
Groups of expressions within a larger phrase that can form a syntactic unit
Cleft
A kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced to the left
Substitution
Replacing a constituent with a single word
Pro-forms
Pronouns and proverbs
Pronouns
He/him, she/her, it. they/them, one, that
Proverb
Do, be, have, there, then, such
Syntactic Categories
Consists of a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties
Syntactic Distribution
Expressions that can occur in almost the same syntactic environments
Noun phrases
Personal pronouns, proper names, and any other expression that have the same distribution
Determiner
The co-occurrence of syntactically different nouns
Count Nouns
Nouns that are able to be counted
Mass Nouns
Nouns that cannot be counted or pluralized
Adjectives
Noun phrases that consist of a determiner and a noun, and single word noun phrases
Intransitive Verbs
Verbs that require no complements
Transitive Verbs
Verbs which require a noun phrase complement to form a verb phrase
Distransitive Verb
Verbs that belong to a syntactic category
Sentential Compliment Verbs
Verbs that require a complement of syntactic category to form a verb phrase
Adverb
Expressions that can occur in a verb phrase as adjuncts
Preposition
Words like with, down, on, in, over, under, for, from, of
Phrase Structure Rules
Similar in form to lexical entries, except that they contain only names of syntactic categories, not do not contain actual linguistic forms
Phrase Structure Tree
A display of the way a sentence is built up from lexical expressions using the phrase structure rules
Ambigous
Linguistic forms that correspond to more than one distinct expression
Homophony
The kind of ambiguity where a single word corresponds to distinct expressions that differ in meaning, syntactic properties, or both
