What is Syntax? Flashcards
Grammatical
A term used to describe a sentence that is in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules.
Ungrammatical
Not in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules
Grammaticality judgement
An instance of a native speaker of some language deciding whether some string of words corresponds ti a syntactically well-formed or grammatical phrasal expression in their native language.
Subject
An expression, typically a noun phrase, that occurs to the left of the verb phrase in an English sentence
Object
A noun phrase that usually occurs immediately to the right of the verb in English. A noun phrase complement.
Principle of compositionality
The notion that the meaning of a phrasal expression is predictable from the meanings of the expressions it contains and how they were syntactically combined
Lexical expressions
A linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon, e.g. single-word expressions and idioms
Phrasal expressions
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions. A multi-word linguistic expression. A sentence is a special kind of phrasal expression
Syntactic properties
Properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely, word order and co-occurence properties
Word order
The linear order in which words can occur in some phrasal expression. Also, the set of syntactic properties of expressions that dictates how they can be ordered with respect to other expressions
Co-occurence
The set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence
Argument
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in that sentence as well
Complements
A non-subject argument of some expression
Adjuncts
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called modifier
Modifier
Also called adjunct
Agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc
Morphosyntax
The name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of gramma
Syntactic constituent
A group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expressions
Cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form
Example: It is/was X that Y; It was Sally that I wanted to meet
Conjunct
An argument of a coordinating conjunction such as [and] or [or]
Syntactic category
A group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties. All expressions that belong to the same syntactic category have more or less the same syntactic distribution
Syntactic distribution
Refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur. If two expressions are interchangeable in all syntactic environments, we say that they have the same syntactic distribution, and therefore belong to the same syntactic category
Noun phrases
The name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expressions with the same syntactic distribution
Determiners
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc. Syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category noun phrase.
