Ling 107

Study Guide (Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics)

You should be able to define and provide an example for each of the following terms:

SYNTAX

Syntactic categories: semantic, morphological and syntactic tests, noun and verb subcategories

Clause, simple sentence, complex sentence, embedded clause, constituent, constituent structure, structural ambiguity, tree diagram

Constituency tests: 1. substitution test, 2. movement test, 3. stand alone test

      (You should be able to use each test to test the constituency of NPs, VPs, and PPs.)

Phrase-structure rules: recursion, subject, direct object, auxiliary verb, adjective phrase, head, specifier, complement, x-bar phrase structure, head-first, head-last

Transformations: deep structure, surface structure, subject-auxiliary inversion, wh-movement, passive

SEMANTICS

Theories of meaning: reference, mental image, prototype, semantic features, truth conditions

Semantic concepts: intension, extension, opaque contexts, semantic composition, possible worlds, presupposition, entailment

Lexical semantics: hyponymy, synonymy, antonymy (complementary, relational, and gradable opposites)

Semantic composition: pure intersection, relative intersection, non-intersection and anti-intersection adjectives)

Linguistic semantics: contextual effects, basic color terms, progressive division of semantic field, absolute and relative systems of spatial reckoning,

PRAGMATICS

Deictic expressions

Speech acts: performative verbs, the hereby test, felicity conditions, direct and indirect speech acts

Rules of conversation: cooperative principle, conversational maxims: quantity, relevance, manner, quality, conversational implicature, cancellation of an implicature

Metaphor