Syntax Vocabulary

Question 1

Syntax

Answer 1

the study of the patterns of formation of sentences and phrases from words.

Question 2

Grammar

Answer 2

the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language.

Question 3

Constituents

Answer 3

a linguistic part of a larger sentence, phrase, or clause.

Question 4

Phrases

Answer 4

a short group of words that are often used together and have a particular meaning.

Question 5

Pronominalisation

Answer 5

the process or fact of using a pronoun instead of another sentence constituent.

Question 6

Pro-form

Answer 6

a word or phrase that can take the place of another word or word group in a sentence.

Question 7

Wh-pronoun

Answer 7

The pronouns who, whose, which, and what can be the subject or object of a verb.

Question 8

Movement

Answer 8

the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities.

Question 9

Coordination test

Answer 9

complex syntactic structure that links together two or more elements.

Question 10

Gapping

Answer 10

elides minimally a finite verb and further any non-finite verbs that are present.

Question 11

Sentence-fragment test

Answer 11

a clause that falls short because it is missing one of three critical components: a subject, a verb, and a complete thought.

Question 12

Structural ambiguity

Answer 12

the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words.

Question 13

Head

Answer 13

the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase.

Question 14

Noun phrases

Answer 14

a phrase formed by a noun and all its modifiers and determiners.

Question 15

Prepositional phrases

Answer 15

a group of words consisting of a preposition, its object, and any words that modify the object.

Question 16

Adjective phrases

Answer 16

a group of words that describe a noun or pronoun in a sentence.

Question 17

Verb phrases

Answer 17

the portion of a sentence that contains both the verb and either a direct or indirect object.

Question 18

Adverb phrases

Answer 18

typically give descriptions of time, location, manner, or reason.

Question 19

Predicative complements

Answer 19

completes the meaning of a sentence by giving information about a noun.

Question 20

Projections

Answer 20

lexical structure must be represented categorically at every syntactic level.

Question 21

Word-classes

Answer 21

a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution.

Question 22

Syntactic categories

Answer 22

a set of words and/or phrases in a language which share a significant number of common characteristics.

Question 23

Parts-of-speech

Answer 23

noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.

Question 24

Complement

Answer 24

part of a word or phrase that completes the predicate.

Question 25

Determiners

Answer 25

a word or group of words that specifies, identifies, or quantifies the noun that follows.

Question 26

Phrase structure rules

Answer 26

a rule that generates a sentence or other syntactic construction from words and phrases and identifies its constituent structure.

Question 27

Subordinate clauses

Answer 27

has a subject and a verb, but it cannot stand alone as a complete sentence.

Question 28

Clause

Answer 28

a group of words that contains both a subject and a predicate but cannot always be considered as a full grammatical sentence.

Question 29

Sentences

Answer 29

a word or a group of words that expresses a thorough idea by giving a statement/order, or asking a question, or exclaiming.

Question 30

Matrix clause

Answer 30

a clause that contains a subordinate clause.

Question 31

Main clause

Answer 31

has a subject and a verb that, together, express a complete thought.

Question 32

Predicate

Answer 32

the part of a sentence that gives information about the subject.

Question 33

Subject-verb agreement

Answer 33

simply means the subject and verb must agree in number, meaning both need to be singular or both need to be plural.

Question 34

Case forms

Answer 34

the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun.

Question 35

Transitive verbs

Answer 35

one that is used with an object: a noun, phrase, or pronoun that refers to the person or thing that is affected by the action of the verb.

Question 36

Intransitive verbs

Answer 36

characterized by not having or containing a direct object.

Question 37

Ditransitive

Answer 37

is one that takes both a direct object and an indirect object.

Question 38

Direct object

Answer 38

a word or phrase denoting the receiver of the action of a verb.

Question 39

Indirect object

Answer 39

a noun or pronoun that indicates to whom or for whom the action of a verb in a sentence is performed.

Question 40

Adverbial

Answer 40

an individual word, a phrase, or a clause that can modify a verb, an adjective, or a complete sentence.