Syntax Flashcards
(40 cards)
Syntax
A component of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions out of smaller expressions.
Linguistic expression
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.
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.
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 lifted in the mental lexicon; single-word expressions and idioms.
Phrasal expressions
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller 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.
Co-occurrence
The set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence.
Arguments
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.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Adjuncts
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called modifier.
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 rule.
Substitution
A constituency test that involves replacing a constituent with a single word, such as a pro-form.
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.
Sentence
A syntactic category that consists of all phrasal expressions that can grammatically occur in Sally thinks that _____.
Noun phrases (NP)
The name of a syntactic category that consists of proper names, pronouns, and all other expressions with the same syntactic distribution.
Nouns (N)
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category. Morphologically, consists of words to which the plural suffix -s or the suffix -like can be added.
Determiners
The name of a lexical category and a syntactic category that consists of expressions such as the, a, this, all, etc…
