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A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology.
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.
A syntactic category is a syntactic unit that theories of syntax assume. Word classes, largely corresponding to traditional parts of speech, are syntactic categories. In phrase structure grammars, the phrasal categories are also syntactic categories. Dependency grammars, however, do not acknowledge phrasal categories.
In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the single argument ("subject") of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the agent ("subject") of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, and certain Indo-European languages. It has also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic languages. Ergative languages are classified into 2 groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative and those that—on top of being ergative morphologically—also show ergativity in syntax. No language has been recorded in which both the morphological and syntactical ergative are present. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter. Dyirbal is said to be the only representative of syntactic ergativity, yet it displays accusative alignment with certain pronouns.
In generative linguistics, Distributed Morphology is a theoretical framework introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz. The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences, both complex phrases and complex words. This approach challenges the traditional notion of the Lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.
A finite verb is the form of a verb that immediately complements a subject unless its clause is expressed in the imperative mood, which typically omits specific mention of the subject. A finite transitive verb or a finite intransitive verb can function as the root of an independent clause. Finite verbs are distinguished from non-finite verbs such as infinitives, participles, gerunds etc.
In linguistics, a grammatical category or grammatical feature is a property of items within the grammar of a language. Within each category there are two or more possible values, which are normally mutually exclusive. Frequently encountered grammatical categories include:
In grammar, a complement is a word, phrase, or clause that is necessary to complete the meaning of a given expression. Complements are often also arguments.
In linguistics, especially within generative grammar, phi features are the morphological expression of a semantic process in which a word or morpheme varies with the form of another word or phrase in the same sentence. This variation can include person, number, gender, and case, as encoded in pronominal agreement with nouns and pronouns. Several other features are included in the set of phi-features, such as the categorical features ±N (nominal) and ±V (verbal), which can be used to describe lexical categories and case features.
The term predicate is used in two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other defines it as only the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition, the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake, while by the second definition, it is only the content verb likes, and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion.
In linguistics, grammatical relations are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional grammar are subject, direct object, and indirect object. In recent times, the syntactic functions, typified by the traditional categories of subject and object, have assumed an important role in linguistic theorizing, within a variety of approaches ranging from generative grammar to functional and cognitive theories. Many modern theories of grammar are likely to acknowledge numerous further types of grammatical relations. The role of grammatical relations in theories of grammar is greatest in dependency grammars, which tend to posit dozens of distinct grammatical relations. Every head-dependent dependency bears a grammatical function.
Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Syntactic 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. The concept of movement is controversial and is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax. Representational theories, in contrast, reject the notion of movement and often instead address discontinuities with other mechanisms including graph reentrancies, feature passing, and type shifters.
Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Hagit Borer is a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research falls within the area of Generative Grammar.
Niina Ning Zhang is a theoretical linguist specializing in Mandarin Chinese syntax and semantics.
The exoskeletal model in linguistics, or XSM, is a generative framework in morphology and morphosyntax, introduced in the work of Hagit Borer, professor of linguistics at the Queen Mary University of London and previously professor of linguistics at University of Southern California. The main idea of the Exoskeletal Model is that Lexical items do not have a syntactic category. Rather, they take on whatever syntactic category is imposed on them by their syntactic context.
Jila Ghomeshi is a Persian-Canadian linguist. She earned her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Diane Massam. She is currently a professor of linguistics at the University of Manitoba, where she has been since 1998.
Raffaella Zanuttini is an Italian linguist whose research focuses primarily on syntax and linguistic variation. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.
In linguistics, a form-meaning mismatch is a natural mismatch between the grammatical form and its expected meaning. Such form-meaning mismatches happen everywhere in language. Nevertheless, there is often an expectation of a one-to-one relationship between meaning and form, and indeed, many traditional definitions are based on such an assumption. For example,
Verbs come in three tenses: past, present, and future. The past is used to describe things that have already happened. The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous. The future tense describes things that have yet to happen.
References
- ↑ "People". Linguistics.utoronto.ca. Archived from the original on 25 February 2015. Retrieved 27 November 2017.
- ↑ Cowper, Elizabeth. "Elizabeth Cowper PhD dissertation" (PDF).
- ↑ "Contrast in Syntax". sites.google.com. Archived from the original on 2020-01-20. Retrieved 2018-03-08.
- ↑ "Elizabeth Cowper citations". scholar.google.se. Retrieved 2018-03-08.
- 1 2 Linguistics, The U. Of T. Department Of (2014-03-08). "What's Happening in Toronto Linguistics : Congratulations, Elizabeth!". What's Happening in Toronto Linguistics. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
- ↑ Linguistics, The U. Of T. Department Of (2016-07-27). "What's Happening in Toronto Linguistics : New issue of The Canadian Journal of Linguistics; Elizabeth Cowper taking over as editor". What's Happening in Toronto Linguistics. Retrieved 2023-05-22.
- ↑ Mathieu, Éric (2013). "Note from the Editor". The Canadian Journal of Linguistics / La revue canadienne de linguistique. 58 (3): 523–524. ISSN 1710-1115.
