intro to language, ch 3 syntax

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. ex: phrasal, lexical, functional

lexical ambiguity

A situation in which a word has two or more meanings. Example: pen-writing instrument pen- a place where pigs live

transitive verb

An action verb that has a direct object, ex: she loves exams

intransitive verbs

Do not require an object: The chorus WAS SINGING as they entered the building.

phrasal categories

NP, VP, PP, AP, PP, ?AdjP, AdvP

syntactic categories found in ALL LANGUAGES

NP, VP, S, Art

phrase structure rules

Rules that provide a set of instructions about how individual words can be clumped into higher-order categories and how these categories are combined to create well-formed sentences. Basically, what is grammatical in the language. show speakers knowledge of word order and groupings of words into syntactic categories. syntactic phenomena and hierarchical structure of sentences in language

Grammaticality

The idea whether a sentence is considered grammatical according to the grammar of a language.this cannot be determined alone by: word order, whether it is meaningful or true

verb phrase (VP)

The name of a syntactic category that consists of all expressions which if combined with a noun phrase to result in a sentence.

noun phrase (NP)

The syntactic category, also phrasal category, of expressions containing some form of a proper name, noun or pronoun as its head, and which functions as the subject or as various objects in a sentence., often contain a determiner (a or the)

ambiguity of a sentence

a combination of differing structure and double word meaning

compliment

a phrasal category that may occur next to a head only. when categories are under the same node, they are referred to as the sister and the head, thus the compliment is the sister of the head, specifier is the sister to the head + complement complex

structural ambiguity

a situation in which a single phrase or sentence has two (or more) different underlying structures and interpretations

noun phrase

a word or group of words that functions in a sentence as subject, object, or prepositional (direct) object.

specifier

an element of a phrase preceding thread, may nob be present at all or have more than one. ex: Betty made Jane wary of snakes. Jane is the specifier of the AP- wary of snakes

phrase structure trees

diagrams which show the syntactic category label of each word grouping. this shows that the speak knows the following things about language: 1. the linear order of the words in the spoken sentence 2.the groupings of words into syntactic categories 3. the hierarchical structure of the groups of words (which are higher and lower) all sentences in all languages can be represented by tress that reveal these properties

deep structures my be transformed into

different surface structures

mental grammar

different than prescriptive grammar

Modals

express notions such as possibility, ability, necessity,- belong to auxiliaries (helping verbs) which is a larger class of verbal elements

determinators DET

include articles such as a or the and demonstratives such as each and every. Tells whether a noun is indefinite or definite ore ht proximity to the person or object

Tense (T)

includes the MODAl AUXILIARIES: my, might , can could must shall, should, will, would and abstract morphemes. provides a verb with a time frame

topicalization in ASL

instead of voice intonation, head motion and facial expression are used as a cue

lexical categories

major grammatical classes into which words (not morphemes) can be divided, N, V, P, A, ADV hard to specify precise meaning because mostly defined by. the lowest level, individual words (leaves) -where in the sentence they occur -what categories co-occur with them -what morphological characters are

topicalization

making a word or phrase the topic of a sentence achieved by bringing the direct object of the verb to the front of the sentence and emphasizing it with innotation

constituents

natural groupings or part of a sentence

recursion

repeating syntactic categories within other syntactic categories (like Russian dolls)

rules of syntax

reveal grammatical relations among the words of a sentence as well as their order and hierarchical organization. They also explain how the groupings of words relates to its meaning such as when a sentence or phrase is ambiguous.

s-structures

surface structures. rules that determine pronunciation

sentence structure

the arrangement of the parts of a sentence, groups of words with a hierarchical structure; not simply strings of words put together .

passive transformation

the process by which an active voice sentence is converted into passive voice, retaining the same mood and tense. Reorders the noun phrases , adds a form of the verb to be and the subject of theorigianl phrase appears as a prepositional phrase headed by the preposition -by

functional categories

these members have grammatical functions rather than descriptive meanings, including DET determiner, or Tense - Aux, complementizer, and preposition.

Question Transformation: Interrogative Reversal

turns declarative d structure into a question by moving the auxiliary verb to the from.