Syntax Questions Flashcards
What are the two types of syntactic categories and what are their characteristics?
1) Lexical (major, open classes): have meaning, can be inflected (N, V, A, P, Adv)
2) Non-lexical (minor, closed classes): Meaning is harder to define, have grammatical function (Det, aux, conj, deg)
What is the morphological frame?
Determines which bound morphemes can attach to certain grammatical categories (N+plural; V+past)
What is the syntactic frame?
Determines which words can attach at the phrasal level (Det+N; Deg+A)
What are the three important components to a phrase?
Head - nucleus, Specifier - helps make the meaning of the head more precise, Compliment - provides more information about entities implied by the head.
What makes a prepositional phrase different from any other type of phrase?
It always contains a compliment, that compliment is always a noun phrase.
What is the Substitution test?
To determine the phrasality of a group of words, states that a group of words is a phrase if you can subsitute them with words such as they, there, or do and still be grammatical.
What is the Movement test?
to test the phrasality of a group of words, states that it is a phrase if it can be moved to another position in the sentence and still be grammatical.
What is the Coordination test?
To test the phrasality of a group of words, states that it is a phrase if it can be joined to another group of words using a conjunction.
Specifiers attach to what level of the X-bar schema?
the XP level
Compliments attach to what level of the X-bar schema?
the X-bar level
What are the two possibilities to refer inflection (I) in a sentence?
-past or +past
What does Merge do?
Merge combines words together to make phrases, phrases to make sentences, and sentences to make larger sentences in a manner that is compatible with the X-bar schema.
What does Move do?
Move transports elements from one position in a sentence to another.
How are yes-no questions formed? (Also called Inversion)
auxiliary verb is moved from I to the complementizer position C
What is a Do insertion?
When a sentence does not contain an auxiliary verb, in order to be changed into a question, a ‘do’ must be inserted into the sentence.
