Syntax Vocabulary Flashcards
Syntax
the study of the patterns of formation of sentences and phrases from words.
Grammar
the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language.
Constituents
a linguistic part of a larger sentence, phrase, or clause.
Phrases
a short group of words that are often used together and have a particular meaning.
Pronominalisation
the process or fact of using a pronoun instead of another sentence constituent.
Pro-form
a word or phrase that can take the place of another word or word group in a sentence.
Wh-pronoun
The pronouns who, whose, which, and what can be the subject or object of a verb.
Movement
the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities.
Coordination test
complex syntactic structure that links together two or more elements.
Gapping
elides minimally a finite verb and further any non-finite verbs that are present.
Sentence-fragment test
a clause that falls short because it is missing one of three critical components: a subject, a verb, and a complete thought.
Structural ambiguity
the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words.
Head
the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase.
Noun phrases
a phrase formed by a noun and all its modifiers and determiners.
Prepositional phrases
a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words that modify the object.
Adjective phrases
a group of words that describe a noun or pronoun in a sentence.
Verb phrases
the portion of a sentence that contains both the verb and either a direct or indirect object.
Adverb phrases
typically give descriptions of time, location, manner, or reason.
Predicative complements
completes the meaning of a sentence by giving information about a noun.
Projections
lexical structure must be represented categorically at every syntactic level.
Word-classes
a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution.
Syntactic categories
a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics.
Parts-of-speech
noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
Complement
part of a word or phrase that completes the predicate.
Determiners
a word or group of words that specifies, identifies, or quantifies the noun that follows.
Phrase structure rules
a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.
Subordinate clauses
has a subject and a verb, but it cannot stand alone as a complete sentence.
Clause
a group of words that contains both a subject and a predicate but cannot always be considered as a full grammatical sentence.
Sentences
a word or a group of words that expresses a thorough idea by giving a statement/order, or asking a question, or exclaiming.
Matrix clause
a clause that contains a subordinate clause.
Main clause
has a subject and a verb that, together, express a complete thought.
Predicate
the part of a sentence that gives information about the subject.
Subject-verb agreement
simply means the subject and verb must agree in number, meaning both need to be singular or both need to be plural.
Case forms
the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun.
Transitive verbs
one that is used with an object: a noun, phrase, or pronoun that refers to the person or thing that is affected by the action of the verb.
Intransitive verbs
characterized by not having or containing a direct object.
Ditransitive
is one that takes both a direct object and an indirect object.
Direct object
a word or phrase denoting the receiver of the action of a verb.
Indirect object
a noun or pronoun that indicates to whom or for whom the action of a verb in a sentence is performed.
Adverbial
an individual word, a phrase, or a clause that can modify a verb, an adjective, or a complete sentence.
