Chapter 5 Flashcards
(43 cards)
Syntax
How sentences and other phrases can be constructed out of smaller phrases and words
Linguistic Expression
A piece of language
grammatical
When a string of words forms a sentence in some language, ie syntactically well-formed
Principle of compositionality
The meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined
grammaticality judgment.
Native speakers of a given language uniquely qualified to decide if a string of words is grammatically correct in their native langauge.
Topicalized sentence
A syntactic constituent occurs at the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
Creates a VSO word order
Argument
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in that sentence as well. If the occurrence of an expression X in a sentence requires the occurrence of an expression Y in that sentence, we say that Y is an argument of X.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
adjunct
optional expression to describe a noun, also known as modifiers.
Types of adjuncts
Attributive adjective: Small dog, small furry dog
Adjunct modifying a grammatically correct existing sentence: Sally’s cat was sleeping (on the desk)
Agreement
Expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender.
morphosyntax.
syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
syntactic constituent
smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed. Sally went to France (In July). Sally devoured (an apple).
Cleft constituent test
A constituent is displaced, or moved to the left.
constituent substitution test
smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed
Pro-form constituent test
A word (e.g., a pronoun) that can replace a syntactic constituent. The cat (she).. On the desk (there)
Syntactic category
a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties; that is, they have approximately the same word order and co-occurrence requirements
Syntactic Distribution
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
Sentence (S)
A syntactic category that consists of all phrasal expressions that can grammatically occur in Sally thinks that ______.Edition.
Noun Phrases (NP)
consists of personal pronouns (he, she, you, it, we, etc.), proper names, and any other expressions that have the same distribution.
Count nouns
Nouns that are able to be counted or pluralized. (one cat, five cats, cats, desks) Singular from, must have determiner.
Mass nouns
cannot be counted, and not normally pluralized. ex: advice, gravel. Can occur without a determiner.
Demonstrative determiners
this, that, these, those
Possessive determiners
my, your, his, her, our etc