Ch 5. Syntax

Question 1

linguistic expressions

Answer 1

a piece of language- it has a certain form, a certain meaning, and, most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well.

Question 2

grammatical

Answer 2

a string of words really does form a sentence of some language

Question 3

ungrammatrical

Answer 3

string of words does not form a sentence

Question 4

grammaticality judgement

Answer 4

is a reflection of speakers’ mental grammar, and not a test of their conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules

Question 5

subject

Answer 5

expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb

Question 6

object

Answer 6

expression that occurs immediately to the right of the verb

Question 7

principle of compositionality

Answer 7

underlies the design feature of productivity

Question 8

lexical expressions

Answer 8

has to be listed in the mental lexicon

Question 9

phrasal expressions

Answer 9

a linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions. a multi-word linguistic expression.

Question 10

syntactic properties

Answer 10

properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions

Question 11

word order

Answer 11

the linear order in which words can occur in some phrasal expression

Question 12

co-occurrence

Answer 12

the set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expression in a sentence

Question 13

topicalized

Answer 13

a syntactic process by which a syntactic constituent occurs at the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion

Question 14

adjuncts

Answer 14

a linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional

Question 15

syntactic constituent

Answer 15

a group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression; the smaller expressions out of which some larger phrasal expression was constructed in accordance with the phrase structure rules

Question 16

cleft

Answer 16

a type of sentence that has the general form It is/was X that Y

Question 17

pro-forms

Answer 17

a reconstructed form of a word

Question 18

syntactic categories

Answer 18

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

Question 19

syntactic distribution

Answer 19

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 categoty

Question 20

noun phases

Answer 20

the name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expression with the same syntactic distribution

Question 21

determiners

Answer 21

name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc.

Question 22

count nouns

Answer 22

a noun that can be counted and pluralized

Question 23

mass nouns

Answer 23

a noun that can not be counted and cannot be pluralized

Question 24

intransitive verbs

Answer 24

verbs that require no complements

Question 25

transitive verbs

Answer 25

the name of the syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with an expression of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase

Question 26

distransitive verbs

Answer 26

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with two expression of category noun phrase to their right result in a verb phrase

Question 27

sentential complement verbs

Answer 27

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that if combined with a sentence to their right result in a verb phrase

Question 28

VP adjuncts

Answer 28

a kind of adjunct that combines with an expression of syntactic category verb phrase with the resulting expression also being of category verb phrase

Question 29

N adjuncts

Answer 29

a kind of adjunct that combines with an expression of syntactic category noun with the resulting expression also being of category noun

Question 30

prepositional phrase

Answer 30

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase

Question 31

lexicon

Answer 31

a mental repository of linguistic information about words and other lexical expressions including their form and meaning and their morphological and syntactic properties

Question 32

phrase structure rules

Answer 32

a recipe for syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories

Question 33

phase structure tree

Answer 33

A visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structure rules

Question 34

ambiguous

Answer 34

can correspond to more than one distinct expression

Question 35

lexical ambiguity

Answer 35

the phenomenon where a single word is the form of two or more distinct linguistic expressions that differ in meaning or syntactic properties

Question 36

homophony

Answer 36

the phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or non phrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form

Question 37

preposition

Answer 37

a word governing, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and expressing a relation to another word or element in the clause

Question 38

adverb

Answer 38

a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc.

Question 39

adjective

Answer 39

a word or phrase naming an attribute, added to or grammatically related to a noun to modify or describe it.

Question 40

nouns

Answer 40

a word (other than a pronoun) used to identify any of a class of people, places, or things common noun