File 5 Vocab Flashcards
(40 cards)
Syntax
A components of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions out of smaller expressions.
Linguistic expressions
A piece of language with a form, a meaning, and syntactic properties.
Grammatical
A 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.
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 expression
A linguistic expression that has to be listed in the mental lexicon.
Phrasal expression
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions.
Syntactic properties
Properties of linguistic expression that dictate how they can syntactically combine with other expressions, namely, word order and co-occurrence properties.
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.
Complements
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Modifiers
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional.
Syntactic constituent
A group of linguistic expressions that function as a syntactic unit within some larger expression.
Cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form it is/was X that Y.
Syntactic categories
A group of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties.
Syntactic distribution
Refers to the set of syntactic environments in which an expression can occur.
Prepositional phrase
The name of a syntactic category that consists of those expressions that contain a preposition and a noun phrase.
Lexical entries
A representation of a lexical expression and its linguistic properties within a descriptive grammar of some language.
Phrase structure rules
A recipe for the syntactically combining expressions of certain syntactic categories.
Phrase structure tree
A visual representation of how phrases are constructed within a descriptive grammar, given the lexicon and the phrase structural rules.
Lexical ambiguities
The phenomenon where a single word is the form of two or more distinct linguistic expressions that differ in meaning or syntactic properties.
Structural ambiguity
The phenomenon where a single string of words is the form of more than one distinct phrasal expression.
Agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence must be inflectionally marked for the same person, number, gender, etc.
Lexicon
A mental repository of linguistic information about words and other lexical expressions, including their form, meaning, morphological, and syntactic properties.