Psycholinguistics Final Study Guide

23 March 2010
Syntax

“sentence level” internal phrase structure: clauses. Clauses=phrases phrase structure rules: how do we organize words?.
Phrases: syntactic units
Tree diagrams – graphical overview of phrase structure

“word classes” open- add new lexical items to them
|Type |Examples |
|Noun |River, intelligence, |
| |Nora, fax, blog |
|Verb |Discuss, remember, feel, gallop, text annoy |
|Adjective |Unhappy, beautiful, tiny, mad, happy |
|Adverb |Fast, still, hopefully, quickly |

closed- ‘function words’ – determiners vs auxiliary.
Determiners: numbers, quantities, pronouns, prepositions, conjuctions, etc
Auxiliary: modal
|Type |Examples |
|Determiner |The, a, this, these |
|Numeral |One, five, ten, eighth |
|Quantifier |All, each, every, both, |
|Pronoun |They, he, she, yours |
|Preposition |Without, in , on, over |
|Conjunction |And, or, yet, but, so |
|Degree Word |Very, so, rather, too |
|Auxiliary Verb |Have, be, do |
|Modal Verb |May, might, can, could |

Phrases/clauses
Phrases= constituents
Head in every phrase determines syntactic category of the phrase
Head= NP, VP, AP, AdvP, PP, XP [placeholder in phrase structure rule indicating a phrase of some type]
Clauses: largest syntactic phrase
Cl( NP VP

Phrase structure rules