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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.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions.
Linguistic typology is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
In linguistics, morphosyntactic alignment is the grammatical relationship between arguments—specifically, between the two arguments of transitive verbs like the dog chased the cat, and the single argument of intransitive verbs like the cat ran away. English has a subject, which merges the more active argument of transitive verbs with the argument of intransitive verbs, leaving the object distinct; other languages may have different strategies, or, rarely, make no distinction at all. Distinctions may be made morphologically, syntactically, or both.
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 two 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.
Herero (Otjiherero) is a Bantu language spoken by the Herero and Mbanderu peoples in Namibia and Botswana, as well as by small communities of people in southwestern Angola. There were 250,000 speakers in these countries between 2015 and 2018.
In linguistics, valency or valence is the number and type of arguments and complements controlled by a predicate, content verbs being typical predicates. Valency is related, though not identical, to subcategorization and transitivity, which count only object arguments – valency counts all arguments, including the subject. The linguistic meaning of valency derives from the definition of valency in chemistry. Like valency found in chemistry, there is the binding of specific elements. In the grammatical theory of valency, the verbs organize sentences by binding the specific elements. Examples of elements that would be bound would be the complement and the actant. Although the term originates from valence in chemistry, linguistic valency has a close analogy in mathematics under the term arity.
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, an argument is an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries. In this regard, the complement is a closely related concept. Most predicates take one, two, or three arguments. A predicate and its arguments form a predicate-argument structure. The discussion of predicates and arguments is associated most with (content) verbs and noun phrases (NPs), although other syntactic categories can also be construed as predicates and as arguments. Arguments must be distinguished from adjuncts. While a predicate needs its arguments to complete its meaning, the adjuncts that appear with a predicate are optional; they are not necessary to complete the meaning of the predicate. Most theories of syntax and semantics acknowledge arguments and adjuncts, although the terminology varies, and the distinction is generally believed to exist in all languages. Dependency grammars sometimes call arguments actants, following Lucien Tesnière (1959).
In linguistics, volition is a concept that distinguishes whether the subject, or agent of a particular sentence intended an action or not. Simply, it is the intentional or unintentional nature of an action. Volition concerns the idea of control and for the purposes outside of psychology and cognitive science, is considered the same as intention in linguistics. Volition can then be expressed in a given language using a variety of possible methods. These sentence forms usually indicate that a given action has been done intentionally, or willingly. There are various ways of marking volition cross-linguistically. When using verbs of volition in English, like "want" or "prefer", these verbs are not expressly marked. Other languages handle this with affixes, while others have complex structural consequences of volitional or non-volitional encoding.
In certain theories of linguistics, thematic relations, also known as semantic roles, are the various roles that a noun phrase may play with respect to the action or state described by a governing verb, commonly the sentence's main verb. For example, in the sentence "Susan ate an apple", Susan is the doer of the eating, so she is an agent; an apple is the item that is eaten, so it is a patient.
In linguistics, subcategorization denotes the ability/necessity for lexical items to require/allow the presence and types of the syntactic arguments with which they co-occur. For example, the word "walk" as in "X walks home" requires the noun-phrase X to be animate.
Transactions of the Philological Society is a linguistics journal published three times a year by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Philological Society. It has appeared since 1854, making it the oldest scholarly linguistics journal. It is currently edited by Lutz Marten ; Frans Plank and Nigel Vincent act as consulting editors.
Ljubov Zinovjevna Sova is a Russian philologist notable for contributions in the field of linguistics and orientalistics. Her main fields of professional interest include linguistics, African philology, semiotics, typology, Slavic languages and journalism.
Dynamic Syntax (DS) is a grammar formalism and linguistic theory whose overall aim is to explain the real-time processes of language understanding and production, and describe linguistic structures as happening step-by-step over time. Under the DS approach, syntactic knowledge is understood as the ability to incrementally analyse the structure and content of spoken and written language in context and in real-time. While it posits representations similar to those used in Combinatory categorial grammars (CCG), it builds those representations left-to-right going word-by-word. Thus it differs from other syntactic models which generally abstract away from features of everyday conversation such as interruption, backtracking, and self-correction. Moreover, it differs from other approaches in that it does not postulate an independent level of syntactic structure over words.
Hilda Judith Koopman is a linguist who does research and fieldwork in the areas of syntax and morphology. She is a professor in the department of Linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is the director of the SSWL database. The SSWL, which she together with Dennis Shasha inherited from Chris Collins at New York University NYU, is an open-ended database of syntactic, morphological, and semantic properties.
Ruth Margaret Kempson, FBA is a British linguist. She is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at King's College, London.
Universal Dependencies, frequently abbreviated as UD, is an international cooperative project to create treebanks of the world's languages. These treebanks are openly accessible and available. Core applications are automated text processing in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and research into natural language syntax and grammar, especially within linguistic typology. The project's primary aim is to achieve cross-linguistic consistency of annotation, while still permitting language-specific extensions when necessary. The annotation scheme has it roots in three related projects: Stanford Dependencies, Google universal part-of-speech tags, and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets. The UD annotation scheme uses a representation in the form of dependency trees as opposed to a phrase structure trees. At the present time, there are just over 200 treebanks of more than 100 languages available in the UD inventory.
In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.
References
- ↑ "Professor Lutz Marten" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
- ↑ "Transactions – The Philological Society" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
- ↑ "Council - The Philological Society" . Retrieved 2024-06-23.
- ↑ Marten, Lutz (1999). Syntactic and Semantic Underspecification in the Verb Phrase (Ph.D. thesis). University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.
- ↑ "Research Project Grants 2014 – Leverhulme Trust" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
- ↑ "Morphosyntactic variation in Bantu: Typology, contact and change – SOAS University of London" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
- ↑ "Dynamic Syntax – Home" . Retrieved 2021-02-23.
