Midterm 2 Flashcards
(107 cards)
Arguments
Grammatical dependents required by a verb.
Ex: “Hit” requires two arguments-
1) The hitter (Subject)
2) Person or thing being hit (Object)
X’ Theory
1) All phrases have a three-level structure (X,X’, and XP).
2) All phrases contain a head, X.
3) If there is a complement, it is attached at the intermediate X’ level, as a sister of the head.
4) If there is a specifier, it is attached at the XP level.
Lexicon
A speaker’s mental dictionary:
- Information about the syntactic properties
- Meaning
- Phonological representation of a language’s words
Specifier
A word that helps to make more precise the meaning of the head of the phrase.
Ex: [the] book
- Occurs immediately beneath XP
Morpheme
The smallest unit of language that carries information about meaning or function.
Ex: “Books” contains two morphemes = [Book] + [s]
Allomorphs
Variants of a morpheme.
Ex: [-s], [-z],and [ęz] are allomorphs of the English plural morpheme.
Affixation
The process that attaches an affix to a base.
Affixes- A bound morpheme that modifies the meaning and/or syntactic (sub)category of the stem in some way.
Ex: [un]read[able]
Derivation
Results in a new lexical item.
1) In morphology, a word-formation process by which a new word is built from a stem—usually through the addition of an affix—that changes the word class and/or basic meaning of the word.
(2) The set of steps or rule applications that results in the formation of a sentence in syntax or of a phonetic representation from an underlying form in phonology.
Inflection
Adds information to a lexical item that already exists.
The modification of a word’s form to indicate the grammatical subclass to which it belongs.
Ex: The [-s] in books marks the plural subclass.
Endocentric Compound
A compound word in which one member identifies the general class to which the meaning of the entire word belongs.
Ex: “Dog food” is a type of food in English.
Exocentric Compound
A compound whose meaning does not follow from the meaning of its parts.
Ex: “Redneck”, since its referent is not a type of neck.
Inversion
A transformation that moves the element in the I position to the position in front of the subject, formulated as: Move to I to C.
Wh-movement
A transformation that moves a wh phrase to the beginning of the sentence, formulated as: Move a wh phrase to the specifier position under CP.
Coordination
The process of grouping together two or more categories of the same type with the help of a conjunction.
Ex: Mary and the white horse.
Syntax
The system of rules and categories the underlies sentence formation in human language.
Universal Grammar (UG)
The system of categories, operations, and principles shared by all human languages and considered to be innate.
Thematic Role
The part played by a particular entity in an event.
Ex: Agent, theme, source, goal location.
Modifiers
An optional element that describes a property of a head.
Ex: “Blue” in “that blue car” or “that Gloria likes” in “the car that Gloria likes”.
Agent
The thematic role of the doer of an action.
Ex: “Marilyn” in “Marilyn fed the dolphin”.
Conversion
A word-formation process that assigns an already existing word to a new syntactic category (also called zero derivation).
Ex: Nurse (V) to nurse (N)
Clipping
A word-formation process that shortens a polysyllabic word by deleting one or more syllables.
Ex: “prof” from “professor”
Blend
A word that is created from parts of two already existing items.
Ex: “Brunch” from “breakfast” and “lunch”.
Backformation
A word-formation process that creates a new word by removing a real or supposed affix from another word in the language.
Ex: “Edit” came from “editor” through the removal of [-or].
Acronyms
A word that is formed by taking the initial letter of (some or all) of the words in a phrase or title and pronouncing them as a word.
Ex: “NATO” for North Atlantic Treaty Organization
