Wh-movementIn linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between what and the object position of doing in "What are you doing?". Interrogative forms are sometimes known within English linguistics as wh-words, such as what, when, where, who, and why, but also include other interrogative words, such as how.
TopicalizationTopicalization is a mechanism of syntax that establishes an expression as the sentence or clause topic by having it appear at the front of the sentence or clause (as opposed to in a canonical position later in the sentence). This involves a phrasal movement of determiners, prepositions, and verbs to sentence-initial position.
Discontinuity (linguistics)In linguistics, a discontinuity occurs when a given word or phrase is separated from another word or phrase that it modifies in such a manner that a direct connection cannot be established between the two without incurring crossing lines in the tree structure. The terminology that is employed to denote discontinuities varies depending on the theory of syntax at hand.
Scrambling (linguistics)Scrambling is a syntactic phenomenon wherein sentences can be formulated using a variety of different word orders without a substantial change in meaning. Instead, the reordering of words from their canonical position has consequences on their contribution to the discourse (i.e., the information's "newness" to the conversation). Scrambling does not occur in English, but it is frequent in languages with freer word order, such as German, Russian, Persian and Turkic languages.
Syntactic movementSyntactic movement is the means by which some theories of syntax address discontinuities. Movement was first postulated by structuralist linguists who expressed it in terms of discontinuous constituents or displacement. Some constituents appear to have been displaced from the position in which they receive important features of interpretation.Constituent (linguistics)In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using tests for constituents. These tests apply to a portion of a sentence, and the results provide evidence about the constituent structure of the sentence. Many constituents are phrases.
CataphoraIn linguistics, cataphora () is the use of an expression or word that co-refers with a later, more specific expression in the discourse. The preceding expression, whose meaning is determined or specified by the later expression, may be called a cataphor. Cataphora is in contrast to anaphora which denotes cases where the order of the expressions is the reverse of that found in cataphora.
Branching (linguistics)In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences. Assuming that the language is being written or transcribed from left to right, parse trees that grow down and to the right are right-branching, and parse trees that grow down and to the left are left-branching.
Government (linguistics)In grammar and theoretical linguistics, government or rection refers to the relationship between a word and its dependents. One can discern between at least three concepts of government: the traditional notion of case government, the highly-specialized definition of government in some generative models of syntax, and a much broader notion in dependency grammars.Center embeddingIn linguistics, center embedding is the process of embedding a phrase in the middle of another phrase of the same type. This often leads to difficulty with parsing which would be difficult to explain on grammatical grounds alone.Shifting (syntax)In syntax, shifting occurs when two or more constituents appearing on the same side of their common head exchange positions in a sense to obtain non-canonical order. The most widely acknowledged type of shifting is heavy NP shift, but shifting involving a heavy NP is just one manifestation of the shifting mechanism. Shifting occurs in most if not all European languages, and it may in fact be possible in all natural languages, including sign languages.
SyntaxIn linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form well-formed larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns in this area of linguistics include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, cross-linguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics).*As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.