Syntax
- Adjunct
o Type of a constituent
o It’s not obligatory in a sentence
o “a word or word group that qualifies or completes the meaning of another word or other words and is not itself a main structural element in its sentence
o an adverb or adverbial phrase (such as heartily in "They ate heartily" or at noon in "We left at noon") attached to the verb of a clause especially to express a relation of time, place, frequency, degree, or manner
o
- Affix
o Type of a morpheme
o It needs to be attached to a head
o Cannot be used on its own
- Agent
o Semantic (thematic) role (the underlying relationship that a participant has with the main verb in a clause)
o Agent is the semantic role of a person or thing who is the doer of an event (can but does not need to be the same things as a causer – The wind closed the door)
- Auxiliary
o a verb that gives grammatical information not given by the main verb of a sentence
o only expresses an additional grammatical information to a main verb
- Base position
o Linked to the function where a moving element originates
o Where its lowest function is realised
- binary branching
o hypothesis
o every branch (of meaning) only has two elements at most
- clause
o a sentence that’s part of another sentence
o main x subordinate clause
o John arrived x when it was raining.
- co-ordination (constituency diagnostic)
o joined by and or or
o corresponds to a single node in the branching system
- complement
o “sister of a head”
o Subordinate to the head
- complementizer
o type of a morpheme that determines the type of a grammatic information
o John doesn’t know that Mary arrived
o words that, in traditional terms, introduce a sentence--subordinate conjunctions
- constituent
o unit of meaning
o corresponds to a node
o can be coordinated, moved around, elided, …
- constituent (wh-) question
o type of a question where the identity of one of the participants of an event is not known and I’m asking about it
o the opposite of yes/no question
- constituency tests
o pronominalisation
o can be moved around in a sentence
o coordinated
o elided/ellipsis
- direct object
o grammatical role (a way to encode
o a noun phrase denoting a person or thing that is the recipient of the action of a transitive verb
- economy (movement)
o movement is as short as possible and tries to move as small a constituent as possible
- ellipsis
o non-pronunciation of something you understand from a sentence
- expletive (subject)
o (of a word or phrase) serving to fill out a sentence or line of verse
o Has no reference – does not refer to any entity
o „I rains.“ – Can ask: „What rains?“
o Pronominal and locative (There is a car there)
- floating quantifier
o a morpheme
o is detached from the noun
o a phenomenon in which a quantifier is separated from the nominal it associates with (The cookies will all have been eaten up by then!)
- head
o part of a constituent that has certain properties
o determines the meaning of the whole
o determines the distribution
- head movement
o usually triggered by the need to place an affix
o movement of a head
- movement
o a notion that describes structures where a sing element has two functions
- passivization
o type of construction where the agent is either completely removed or is not prominent and the patient becomes the subject
- pronoun (replacement)
o type of a test used for constituency
- relative clause
o modifies a noun
o “A person that I met”
- Subject
o Type of a grammatical role (a way of coding a semantic role)
o Corresponds to a noun phrase in nominative
o Disappears in infinitive (*John to write books)
- subject auxiliary inversion
o in questions
o Will John be tired x John will be tired
o Marks yes/no questions in English
- thematic role = semantic role
- transitive verb
o a verb that has an agent and a patient, has an argument
intransitive verb o a verb that does not require a direct object, often involving a subject and an action.