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List Of Syntactic Phenomena
A list of phenomena in syntax. * Anaphora * Agreement * Answer ellipsis * Antecedent-contained deletion * Binding * Differential Object Marking * Case * Clitics * Control * Coreference * Discontinuity * Do-support * Dummy pronouns * Ellipsis * Ergative verb * Exceptional case-marking * Existential clauses * Expletives * Extraposition * Gapping * Heavy NP shift * Inverse copula sentences * Movement paradoxes * Negative inversion * Non-configurational language * Parasitic gaps * Pied-piping * Pro-drop * Pseudogapping * Raising (linguistics) * Reciprocal (grammar) * Reflexive pronouns * Reflexive verbs * Right node raising * Scrambling * Shifting * Sluicing * Small clause * Stripping * Subject-auxiliary inversion * Topicalization * Tough movement * Unaccusative verbs * V2 word order * Verb phrase ellipsis * Wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative word ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. Etymology The word ''syntax'' comes from Ancient Greek roots: "coordination", which consists of ''syn'', "together", and ''táxis'', "ordering". Topics The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that a syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Existential Clause
An existential clause is a clause that refers to the existence or presence of something, such as "There is a God" and "There are boys in the yard". The use of such clauses can be considered analogous to existential quantification in predicate logic, which is often expressed with the phrase "There exist(s)...". Different languages have different ways of forming and using existential clauses. For details on the English forms, see English grammar: ''There'' as pronoun. Formation Many languages form existential clauses without any particular marker by simply using forms of the normal copula verb (the equivalent of English ''be''), the subject being the noun (phrase) referring to the thing whose existence is asserted. For example, the Finnish sentence , meaning "There are boys in the yard", is literally "On the yard is boys". Some languages have a different verb for that purpose: Swedish has , literally "It is found boys on the yard". On the other hand, some languages do not re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reciprocal (grammar)
A reciprocal construction (abbreviated ) is a grammatical pattern in which each of the participants occupies both the role of agent and patient with respect to the other. An example is the English sentence ''John and Mary criticized each other'': John criticized Mary, and Mary criticized John. Reciprocal constructions can be said to express mutual relationships. Many languages, such as Semitic languages, Altaic languages or Bantu languages, have special reciprocal affixes in verbs. Other languages, including English, use reciprocal pronouns such as ''"each other"'' to indicate a mutual relation. Latin uses the preposition ''inter'' and its reflexive pronoun ''inter se'' (between themselves) when the verb is third person. Most Indo-European languages do not have special reciprocal affixes on verbs, and mutual relations are expressed through reflexive constructions or other mechanisms. For example, Russian reciprocal constructions have the suffix -sja (-ся, 'self'), which a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raising (linguistics)
In linguistics, raising constructions involve the movement of an argument from an embedded or subordinate clause to a matrix or main clause; in other words, a raising predicate/verb appears with a syntactic argument that is not its semantic argument, but is rather the semantic argument of an embedded predicate. For example, in ''they seem to be trying'', the predicand of ''trying'' is the subject of ''seem''. Although English has raising constructions, not all languages do. The term ''raising'' has its origins in the transformational analysis of such constructions; the constituent in question is seen as being "raised" from its initial deep structure position, as the subject of the embedded predicate, to its surface structure position in the matrix predicate/verb. Raising predicates/verbs are related to control predicates, although there are important differences between the two predicate/verb types. Examples There are at least two types of raising predicates/verbs: raising-to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pseudogapping
Pseudogapping is an ellipsis (linguistics), ellipsis mechanism that elides most but not all of a non-finite verb, non-finite verb phrase; at least one part of the verb phrase remains, which is called the ''remnant''. Pseudogapping occurs in comparative and contrastive contexts, so it appears often after subordinators and coordinators such as ''if'', ''although'', ''but'', ''than'', etc. It is similar to verb phrase ellipsis (VP-ellipsis) insofar as the ellipsis is introduced by an auxiliary verb, and many grammarians take it to be a particular type of VP-ellipsis. The distribution of pseudogapping is more restricted than that of VP-ellipsis, however, and in this regard, it has some traits in common with gapping. But unlike gapping (but like VP-ellipsis), pseudogapping occurs in English but not in closely related languages. The analysis of pseudogapping can vary greatly depending in part on whether the analysis is based in a phrase structure grammar or a dependency grammar. Pseudogappi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pro-drop Language
A pro-drop language (from "pronoun-dropping") is a language where certain classes of pronouns may be omitted when they can be pragmatically or grammatically inferable. The precise conditions vary from language to language, and can be quite intricate. The phenomenon of "pronoun-dropping" is part of the larger topic of zero or null anaphora. The connection between pro-drop languages, and null anaphora relates to the fact that a dropped pronoun has referential properties, and so is crucially not a null dummy pronoun. Pro-drop is licensed only in languages that have a positive setting of the pro-drop parameter, which allows the null element to be identified by its governor. Pro-drop is a problem when translating to a non-pro-drop language such as English, which requires the pronoun to be added, especially noticeable in machine translation. Amongst other reasons, it can also pose a problem with respect to transfer errors and second language acquisition. Non-pro-drop is an areal f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pied-piping
In linguistics, pied-piping is a phenomenon of syntax whereby a given focused expression brings along an encompassing phrase with it when it is moved. The term was introduced by John Robert Ross in 1967. It references the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, where a piper lured rats and children away from their town. In syntactic pied-piping, a focused expression (such as an interrogative word) pulls its host phrase with it when it moves to its new position in the sentence. Metaphorically, the focused expression is the piper and the host phrase is the material being pied-piped. Pied-piping is an aspect of syntactic discontinuities, having to do with constituents that can and cannot be discontinuous. While pied-piping is most visible in cases of wh-fronting of information questions and relative clauses, it is not limited to ''wh''-fronting. It can also occur with almost any type of discontinuity, including extraposition, scrambling, and topicalization. Most, if not all, languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parasitic Gap
In generative grammar, a parasitic gap is a construction in which one gap appears to be dependent on another gap. Thus, the one gap can appear only by virtue of the appearance of the other gap, hence the former is said to be "parasitic" on the latter. For example, in the example sentence in (1) the first gap is represented by an underscore ( __ ), and appears as a result of movement of the constituent ''which explanation'' to the beginning of the sentence. The second gap is represented by an underscore with a subscript p ( __p); this is the "parasitic gap". : While parasitic gaps are present in English and some related Germanic languages, e.g. Swedish (see Engdahl 1983), their appearance is much more restricted in other, closely related languages, e.g. German and the Romance languages. Japanese linguistic scholar Fumikazu Niinuma has attempted to differentiate between parasitic gaps and coordination in his research, as he believes the two are often confused. An aspect of parasitic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Non-configurational Language
In generative grammar, non-configurational languages are languages characterized by a flat phrase structure, which allows syntactically discontinuous expressions, and a relatively free word order. History of the concept of "non-configurationality" The concept of non-configurationality was developed by grammarians working within Noam Chomsky's generative framework. Some of these linguists observed that the Syntactic Universals proposed by Chomsky and which required a rigid phrase structure was challenged by the syntax of some of the world's languages that had a much less rigid syntax than that of the languages on which Chomsky had based his studies. The concept was invented by Ken Hale who described the syntax of Warlpiri as being non-configurational. However, the first to publish a description of non-configurationality was Chomsky himself in his 1981 lectures on Government and Binding, in which he referred to an unpublished paper by Hale. Chomsky made it a goal of the Government a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Negative Inversion
In linguistics, negative inversion is one of many types of subject–auxiliary inversion in English. A negation (e.g. ''not'', ''no'', ''never'', ''nothing'', etc.) or a word that implies negation (''only'', ''hardly'', ''scarcely'') or a phrase containing one of these words precedes the finite auxiliary verb necessitating that the subject and finite verb undergo inversion. Negative inversion is a phenomenon of English syntax. Other Germanic languages have a more general V2 word order, which allows inversion to occur much more often than in English, so they may not acknowledge negative inversion as a specific phenomenon. While negative inversion is a common occurrence in English, a solid understanding of just what elicits the inversion has not yet been established. It is, namely, not entirely clear why certain fronted expressions containing a negation elicit negative inversion, but others do not. As with subject-auxiliary inversion in general, negative inversion results in a discon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Movement Paradox
A movement paradox is a phenomenon of grammar that challenges the transformational approach to syntax. The importance of movement paradoxes is emphasized by those theories of syntax (e.g. lexical functional grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, construction grammar, most dependency grammars) that reject movement, i.e. the notion that discontinuities in syntax are explained by the movement of constituents. Syntactic movement Given a transformational approach to syntax, the following related sentences are explained in terms of movement: ::a. We talked about the fact that he was sick for days. ::b. The fact that he was sick, we talked about ___ for days. - Example of topicalization The underlined noun phrase, which contains a clause, is taken to have moved leftward in the second sentence, the blank marking its starting position. A transformational approach to syntax will explain all sorts of discontinuities (e.g. wh-fronting, topicalization, extraposition, scrambl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Inverse Copula
In linguistics, inverse copular constructions, named after Moro (1997), are a type of inversion in English where canonical SCP word order (subject- copula- predicative expression, e.g. ''Fred is the plumber'') is reversed in a sense, so that one appears to have the order PCS instead (predicative expression-copula-subject, e.g. ''The plumber is Fred''). The verb in these constructions is always the copula ''be'' (''am'', ''are'', ''is'', ''was'', ''were''). Inverse copular constructions are intriguing because they render the distinction between subject and predicative expression difficult to maintain. The confusion has led to focused study of these constructions,Inverse copular constructions have been explored in great depth. See Moro (1997) for the original proposal, Heycock and Kroch (1998), Pereltsvaig (2001), Mikkelsen (2005). and their impact on the theory of grammar may be great since they appear to challenge the initial binary division of the sentence (S) into a subject noun p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
