ENG 211 CH 5 Flashcards
(40 cards)
SYNTAX
is the component of grammar that deals with how words and phrases are combined into larger phrases.
LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS
is just a piece of language–it has a certain form, a certain meaning, and , most relevantly, some syntactic properties as well.
GRAMMATICAL
When a string of words really does form a sentence of some language.
UNGRAMMATICAL
If some string of words does not form a sentence.
GRAMMATICAL JUDGMENT
is a reflection of speakers’ mental grammar and not a text of their conscious knowledge of the prescriptive rules.
SUBJECT
expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb…
OBJECT
the word that occurs immediately to the right of the verb…
PRINCIPLE OF COMPOSTIONALITY
The fact that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of the expressions it contains and on the way they are syntactically combined.
LEXICAL EXPRESSIONS
When you know a language, you can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences because you know the meanings.
PHRASAL EXPRESSIONS
…and you know the consequences that different ways of syntactically combining them will have on the meaning of larger, multi-word.
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
How are expressions allowed to be ordered with respect to one another…
CO-OCCURRENCE
If some expression occurs in a sentence, what other expressions can or must co-occur with it in that sentence…
ARGUMENTS
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.
COMPLEMENTS
A noun-subject argument of some expression.
ADJUNCTS
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optoinal; also called modifier.
MODIFIERS
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional.
AGREEMENT
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.
MORPHOSYNTAX
The name fro syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
SYNTACTIC CONSTITUENT
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.
CLEFT
A type of sentence that has the general form It is/was X that Y, e.g., It was Sally that I wanted to meet. Can be used as a constituency test.
SUBSTITUTION
In syntax, a constituency test that involves replacing a constituent with a single word (or simple phrase), such as a pro-form. In language processing, production error in which one unit is replaced with another.
PRO-FORMS
A word (e.g., a pronoun) that can replace a syntactic constituent.
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.
