ENG 211 - Ch 5

Question 1

linguistic expressions

Answer 1

a piece of language with a form, a meaning, and syntactic properties

Question 2

grammatical

Answer 2

a term used to describe a sentence that is in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules.

Question 3

grammaticality judgment

Answer 3

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

Question 4

principle of compositionality

Answer 4

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

Question 5

lexical expression

Answer 5

a linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon, e.g., single-word expressions and idioms

Question 6

phrasal expression

Answer 6

a linguistic-expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions. a multi-word linguistic expression.n a sentence is a special kind of phrasal expression.

Question 7

syntactic properties

Answer 7

properties of linguistic expressions that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely, word order and co-occurrence properties

Question 8

word order

Answer 8

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.

Question 9

argument

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

complements

Answer 10

a non-subject argument of some expression

Question 11

adjuncts

Answer 11

a linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called modifier

Question 12

agreement

Answer 12

the phenomenon by which certain expression in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.

Question 13

syntactic constituent

Answer 13

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 14

cleft

Answer 14

a type of sentence that has the general form. can be used as a constituency test.

Question 15

substitution

Answer 15

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, a productionn error in which one unit is replaced with another.

Question 16

pro-forms

Answer 16

a word (e.g., a pronoun) that can replace a syntactic constituent

Question 17

syntactic categories

Answer 17

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 18

syntactic distribution

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

sentence

Answer 19

a syntactic category that consists of all phrasal expressions that can grammatically occur in ‘Sally thinks that ____’

Question 20

noun phrases

Answer 20

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

Question 21

determiners

Answer 21

the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all,etc. Syntactically, consissts of those expressions that when combined wiht an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category noun phrase.

Question 22

intransitive verbs

Answer 22

the name for the set of lexical expressions whose syntactic category is verb phrase

Question 23

verb phrase

Answer 23

the name of a syntactic category that consists of all expressions that, if combined with a noun phrase to their left, result in a sentence.

Question 24

ditransitive verbs

Answer 24

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

Question 25

sentential complement verbs

Answer 25

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; a verb that needs a sentence as its complement

Question 26

preopositional phrase

Answer 26

the name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase. can be verb phrase adjuncts or noun adjuncts.

Question 27

lexical entries

Answer 27

a representation of a lexical expression and its linguistic properties within a descriptive grammar of some language. a collection of lexical entries constitutes the lexicon.

Question 28

phase structure rules

Answer 28

a recipe for syntatically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories. along with the lexicon, phrase structure rules are a part of a descriptive grammar of some language.

Question 29

phase structure tree

Answer 29

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

Question 30

ambiguous

Answer 30

the phenomenon by which a single linguistic form (e.g., a word or a string of words) can be the form of more than one distinct linguistic expression. the form that is shared by more than one expression is said to be ambiguous.

Question 31

homophony

Answer 31

the phenomenon by which two or more distinct morphemes or nonphrasal linguistic expressions happen to have the same form, i.e., sound the same.

Question 32

structural ambiguity

Answer 32

the phenomenon where a single string of words (or morphemes) is the form of more than one distinct phrasal expression (or word). arises because the same expressions can combine differently syntactically, resulting in distinct phrases that happen to have the same form.

Question 33

ungrammatical

Answer 33

not in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules. when some phrasal expression is not constructed in accordance with the syntactic rules of a language, we say it is ungrammatical or syntactically ill-informed