Syntax Ch. 5 Flashcards
Syntax
The component of grammar that deals with how words and phrases are all linguistic expressions
Linguistic Expression
A piece of language in a certain form, meaning, and syntactic properties
Grammatical
A syntactically well-formed sentence in some language
Ungrammatical
A syntactically ill-formed sentence
Grammaticality Judgment
A reflection of speakers’ mental grammar
Subject
The expression that usually occurs immediately to the left of the verb
Object
The expression that usually occurs to the right of the verb
Principle of Compositionality
Underlies the design feature of productivity
Lexical Expressions
Words
Phrasal Expressions
Multiword syntactical combinations
Word Order
How expressions are ordered
Co-occurrence
The simultaneous occurrence of expressions in a sentence
Argument
The event that an occurrence of an expression in a sentence necessitates the occurrence of another expression
Complements
Non-subject arguments
Adjuncts
Expressions whose occurrence in a sentence is optional
Modifiers
Sometimes called adjuncts, adjectives that modify the meaning of a word
Agreement
Strict requirements regarding the kind of argument that an expression can have regarding the combination of grammatical features
Syntactic Consituent
Groups of expressions within a larger phrase that can form a syntactic unit
Cleft
A kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced to the left
Substitution
Replacing a constituent with a single word
Pro-forms
Pronouns and proverbs
Pronouns
He/him, she/her, it. they/them, one, that
Proverb
Do, be, have, there, then, such
Syntactic Categories
Consists of a set of expressions that have very similar syntactic properties
