File 5 Flashcards
Syntax (40 cards)
linguistic expressions
a piece of language with a form, a meaning, and syntactic properties.
grammaticality judgment
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
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 were 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 smaller expressions. a multi-word linguistic expression. a sentence is a special kind of phrasal expression
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. a noun phrase is a complement
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
co-occurrence
the set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence
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
complements
a non subject argument of some expression
adjuncts
a linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional, also called modifier
modifiers
See adjunct
agreement
the phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, 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
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, such as a pro-form. in language processing, a production error in which one unit is replaced with another
pro-forms
a word 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
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 sat that they have the same syntactic distribution and therefore belong to the same syntactic category
adjectives
the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category. morphologically, consists of words to which the comparative suffix -er or the suffix -ness can be added. syntactically, the category consists of those expressions that can be noun adjuncts or occur in between a determiner and a noun
noun phrases
the name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expressions with the same syntactic distribution
determiners
the name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc. syntactically, consists of those expressions that when combined with an expression of category noun to their right result in an expression of category noun phrase
