In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a word that substitutes for a noun or noun phrase. It is a particular case of a pro-form.
In linguistics, a determiner phrase (DP) is a type of phrase posited by some theories of syntax. The head of a DP is a determiner, as opposed to a noun. For example in the phrase the car, the is a determiner and car is a noun; the two combine to form a phrase, and on the DP-analysis, the determiner the is head over the noun car. The existence of DPs is a controversial issue in the study of syntax. The traditional analysis of phrases such as the car is that the noun is the head, which means the phrase is a noun phrase (NP), not a determiner phrase. Beginning in the mid 1980s, an alternative analysis arose that posits the determiner as the head, which makes the phrase a DP instead of an NP.
Government and binding is a theory of syntax and a phrase structure grammar in the tradition of transformational grammar developed principally by Noam Chomsky in the 1980s. This theory is a radical revision of his earlier theories and was later revised in The Minimalist Program (1995) and several subsequent papers, the latest being Three Factors in Language Design (2005). Although there is a large literature on government and binding theory which is not written by Chomsky, Chomsky's papers have been foundational in setting the research agenda.
A verbal noun is a noun formed from or otherwise corresponding to a verb. Different languages have different types of verbal nouns and different ways of forming and using them. An example of a verbal noun in English is the word singing in the sentence "Singing is fun" . Verbal nouns may be non-finite verb forms such as infinitives or gerunds in English usage. They may also be "pure" verbal nouns, formed from verbs, but behaving grammatically entirely like nouns rather than verbs. Such cases may also be called deverbal nouns.
In grammar, an antecedent is an expression that gives its meaning to a proform. A preform takes its meaning from its antecedent, e.g. "John arrived late because traffic held him up". The pronoun him refers to and takes its meaning from John, so John is the antecedent of him. Proforms usually follow their antecedents, but sometimes they precede them, in which case one is, technically, dealing with postcedents instead of antecedents. The prefix ante- means "before" or "in front of", and post- means "after" or "behind". The term antecedent stems from traditional grammar. The linguistic term that is closely related to antecedent and proform is anaphora. Theories of syntax explore the distinction between antecedents and postcedents in terms of binding.
Spanish verbs form one of the more complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate to high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in Spanish conjugation.
Portuguese grammar, the morphology and syntax of the Portuguese language, is similar to the grammar of most other Romance languages — especially that of Spanish, and even more so to that of Galician. It is a relatively synthetic, fusional language.
Tagalog grammar is the body of rules that describe the structure of expressions in the Tagalog language, the language of the Tagalog region of the Philippines.
The modal verbs of English are a small class of auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality. They can be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness and by the fact that they do not take the ending -(e)s in the third-person singular.
In language, a reflexive pronoun, sometimes simply called a reflexive, is a pronoun that is preceded or followed by the noun, adjective, adverb or pronoun to which it refers within the same clause.
In linguistics, an adverbial phrase ("AdvP") is a multi-word expression operating adverbially: its syntactic function is to modify other expressions, including verbs, adjectives, adverbs, adverbials, and sentences. Adverbial phrases can be divided into two types: complement adverbs versus modifier adverbs. For example, in the sentence She sang very well, the expression very well is an adverbial phrase, as it modifies the verb sing. More specifically, the adverbial phrase very well contains two adverbials, very and well: while well modifies the verb to convey information about the manner of singing, very is a degree modifier that conveys information about the degree to which the action of singing well was accomplished.
Arbitrariness is the quality of being "determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle".
The projection principle is a stipulation proposed by Noam Chomsky as part of the phrase structure component of generative-transformational grammar. The projection principle is used in the derivation of phrases under the auspices of the principles and parameters theory.
In linguistics, subordination is a principle of the hierarchical organization of linguistic units. While the principle is applicable in semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology, most work in linguistics employs the term "subordination" in the context of syntax, and that is the context in which it is considered here. The syntactic units of sentences are often either subordinate or coordinate to each other. Hence an understanding of subordination is promoted by an understanding of coordination, and vice versa.
In linguistics, an empty category is an element in the study of syntax that does not have any phonological content and is therefore unpronounced. Empty categories may also be referred to as covert categories, in contrast to overt categories which are pronounced. When representing empty categories in tree structures, linguists use a null symbol to depict the idea that there is a mental category at the level being represented, even if the word(s) are being left out of overt speech. The phenomenon was named and outlined by Noam Chomsky in his 1981 LGB framework, and serves to address apparent violations of locality of selection — there are different types of empty categories that each appear to account for locality violations in different environments.
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. Certain constituents appear to have been displaced from the position where they receive important features of interpretation. The concept of movement is controversial; it is associated with so-called transformational or derivational theories of syntax. Representational theories, in contrast, reject the notion of movement, often addressing discontinuities in terms of feature passing or persistent structural identities instead.
In linguistics, locality refers to the proximity of elements in a linguistic structure. Constraints on locality limit the span over which rules can apply to a particular structure. Theories of transformational grammar use syntactic locality constraints to explain restrictions on argument selection, syntactic binding, and syntactic movement.
A bound variable pronoun is a pronoun that has a quantified determiner phrase (DP) – such as every, some, or who – as its antecedent.
Tiri, or Mea, is an Oceanic language of New Caledonia.
