Syntax Flashcards
(40 cards)
Syntax
A component of mental grammar that deals with constructing phrasal expressions out of smaller 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.
Grammatical
A term used to describe a sentence that is in accordance with the descriptive grammatical rules of some language, especially syntactic rules. When some phrasal expression is constructed in accordance with the syntactic rules of a language, we say it is grammatical or syntactically well-formed.
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.
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 complement.
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, e.g. single-word expressions and idioms.
Phrasal Expressions
A linguistic expression that results from the syntactic combination of smaller expressions. A multi-word linguistic expression. A sentence is special kind of phrasal 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.
Co-occurrence
The set of syntactic properties that determines which expressions may or have to co-occur with some other expressions in a sentence.
Topicalization
A syntactic process which a syntactic constituent occurs the beginning of a sentence in order to highlight the topic under discussion.
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 of X.
Complement
A non-subject argument of some expression.
Adjunct
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called modifier.
Modifiers
A linguistic expression whose occurrence in a sentence is optional; also called adjunct.
Agreement
The phenomenon by which certain expressions in a sentence (e.g. a verb and its subject) 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 expressions was constructed in accordance with the phrase structure rules.
Morphosyntax
The name for syntax and morphology considered jointly as a single component of grammar.
Cleft
A type of sentence that has the general form, “It is/was X and Y, e.g. It was Sally that I wanted to meet.” Can be used as a constituency test.
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 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 in “Sally thinks that ______.”
