Crash Course Linguistics: Syntax

Vocabulary flashcards covering core syntactic concepts, grammaticality, tests for sentence constituency, and morphosyntax from the Crash Course Linguistics lecture on syntax.

Syntax

The study of how languages express relationships between words.

Morpheme

The smallest unit of meaning in a language.

Grammatical

The status of a sentence when its word order and word shapes conform to a native speaker's intuitive mental grammar, regardless of whether it makes sense or has authority approval.

Ungrammatical

The status of a sentence when its word order and word shapes are in tension or violate native speaker intuition, typically designated by an asterisk (*).

Asterisk (*)

A symbol used by linguists to mark an ungrammatical sentence (for example, *me see they).

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

A famous sentence coined by linguist Noam Chomsky to demonstrate that a sentence can be fully grammatical while being completely nonsensical in meaning.

Idiolect

An individual's unique, personal version of language and mental grammar.

Substitution test

A syntactic test where a single word is substituted for a group of words while preserving meaning to determine if that group acts as a single structural unit.

Cleft construction

A sentence structure framed with "it's" and "that" (such as "It's Taylor who sees the rabbit") used to test the movement of word groups.

Cleft test

A diagnostic test used to identify constituents by testing whether placing a specific word or group of words between "it's" and "that" results in a grammatical sentence.

Predicate

A syntactic unit that describes the grouping of the verb and the object together.

Constituent

A distinct sub-group of words that constitutes, or makes up a part of, a larger whole within a sentence.

Grammar

The structural patterns describing how a language puts morphemes together into words, words together into constituents, and constituents into sentences.

Morphosyntax

The structural combination of morphology and syntax within a language.