File 5 Flashcards
Syntax
A component of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions. Also a name for the subfield of linguistics which studies how expressions can combine to form larger expressions.
Linguistic Expressions
A piece of language with a form, a meaning, and syntactic properties.
Compositionality
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.
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.
Lexical Expressions
A linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon, e.g. single-word expressions and idioms.
Phrasal Expression
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of expressions. A multi-word linguistic expression.
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
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.
Topicalized
A syntactic process by which a syntactic constituent occurs the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
Arguments
A linguistic expression that must occur in a sentence if some other expression occurs in the sentence as well.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Morphosyntax
The name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
Adjuncts
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional ; also called a modifier.
Agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, gender, number, etc.
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.
Conjunts
An argument of a coordinating conjunction such as and or or.
Cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form It is/was X and Y, e.g. Can be used as a constituency test.
Syntactic Category
A group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties. All expressions that belong to the 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. 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
A syntactic category that consists of all phrasal expressions that can grammatically occur.
Noun Phrase
The name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expressions with the same syntactic distributions.
Determiners
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc.
Verb Phrase
The name of a syntactic category that consists of all expressions which if combined with a noun phrase to their left result in a sentence.
Intransitive Verbs
The name for the set of lexical expressions whose syntactic category is verb phrase.
