LING 2005 FOCUSED

  • Aspect: the properties of an event or situation denoted by the verb phrase (context)

  • Aspectual verbs: verbs that help indicate that an action is ongoing or complete such as, continue to dance;stop driving

  • Reduplication: all or part of the base is doubled (part = partial reduplication)

  • Suppletion: a morpheme is replaced by an entirely different morpheme

  • Perfective: a point or unit of time expressing a completed action (something has happened and is done)

  • Imperfective: an action not completed, repeated, or ongoing (flow of time)

  • Infinitive: a form of the verb that is typically used together with another verb in many languages, 

  • Derivation: modification of a word’s function or meaning (eg V → N)

  • Inflection: the modification of a word’s form to indicate grammatical information

  • Content Morpheme: type of morpheme, for example noun, adjective, bound root, etc, give specific meaning

  • Function Morphemes: for grammar, for example determiners, inflectional affixes, pronouns

  • Definite: something known (quantity, specificity)

  • Indefinite: something new or unknown

  • Conversion (zero derivation): changes an existing word to a different syntactic category with no change in its form. (n → V but same word)

  • Derivation: changes an existing word to a different syntactic category with a change in its form.

  • Phonotactics: the possible combination of sounds in a specific language

  • Vowel Harmony: vowels within a domain adjust to share one or more phonological feature such as height.

  • Epenthesis: the insertion of a segment between two other segments that would otherwise be violating a phonotactic constraint.

  • Elision: the omission of sounds, syllables, or words. 

  • Metathesis: the transposition or exchange of sounds or syllables in a word. 

  • Auxiliary verb (Aux): ‘specifies’ the verb

  • modal verbs: will, would, can, could, may, might, must, should 

  • non-modal verbs: be, have, do 

  • Conjunction (Conj): combines phrases and clauses 

  • Degree word: describes a measure of Adj or P 

  • Quantifier: describes the quantity of N 

  • Complementizer: connects complement clauses into matrix clauses 

    • I hope that I have enough time

  • Prepositions & Postpositions: A lexical category that functions as the head of a prepositional phrase (into, with, for, etc.) and occurs: 

  • PREPOSITION: before its complement  (a hat)

  • POSTPOSITION: after its complement  (hat a)

  • Intransitive: Verbs that are used without an object 

  • Transitive: Verbs that are used with an object

  • spatial (deictic): descriptions of objects and their relations in a given environment 

    • here, there, that, etc. 

  • temporal (deictic): the various times involved in and referred to in an utterance 

    • now, then, later, etc. 

  • deixis: the use of certain words to specify time, place, or person whose denotation changes with context

  • associative: a grammatical category that expresses "X and the group (of one or more members) associated with X", where X is a nominal, usually a person. 

    • “Susan and her colleagues” 

  • benefactive: one constituent receives the benefit of the situation in the clause (FOR)

    • “She opened the door for Tom” 

  • genitive: an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun (‘s, of)

    • “Mary’s book is about the men of Rome” 

  • locative: indicates a location “The book is on the table”

  • ergative: the grammatical case that identifies a nominal phrase as the agent of a transitive verb in ergative– absolutive languages. 

  • absolutive: the case used to mark both the subject of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb in addition to being used for the citation form of a noun. 

  • nominative: generally marks the subject of a verb, the noun 

    • She greeted him" 

  • accusative: the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb, 

    • “She greeted him” 

  • dative: the recipient or beneficiary of an action, typically a giving action (TO)

    • “She gave the book to him” 

  • Embedded Clause: a type of subordinate clause placed within the main clause in a sentence. They do not make sense as stand- alone sentences, unlike main clauses. 

  • Recursive Embedded Clauses: the sentence is expressed by using a clause embedded within a clause, embedded within another clause

  • Complement Clause: a subordinate clause that functions as the subject or object of a verb, thereby completing the sentence 

  • Relative Clause: It has a subject and verb, but can't stand alone as a sentence. It is sometimes called an “adjective clause” because it functions like an adjective—it gives more information about a noun.

  • Transformations: a syntactic rule that can move an element from one position to another.