Chapter 5 Syntax Flashcards
(40 cards)
syntax
study of how expressions can combine to form larger expressions.
linguistic expressions
a piece of language with a form, meaning, and syntactic properties.
grammatical
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 to 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
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 are syntactically combined
lexical expressions
a linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon
phrasal expressions
a linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of small expressions.
syntactic properties
properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely word order and co-occurrence properties
word order
linear order in which words can occur in some phrasal expression
co-occurrence
the set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence.
topicalized
a syntactic process by which a syntactic constituent occurs the beginning of a sentence in order to high-light the topic under discussion
agrument
a linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expressions occurs in that sentence as well.
complements
a noun-subject agruement of some expression
modifiers
see adjunct
agreement
the phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, and gender
morphosyntax
the name for syntac and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar
syntactic constituents
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 contructed in accordance with the phrasal structure rules.
cleft
a sentence that has the general form It is/was X and Y
syntactic categories
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. it two expressions are interchangeable in all syntactic environments we say that they have the same syntactic distributions and therefore belong to the same syntactic category
deteminers
consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to theri right result in an expression of category noun phrase
