Glossaryfinite verb form: a verb form that is inflected for tense in a visible or invisible
form. In English this inflection is visible only in the past tense or in SG3
in the present tense.
finiteness: whether a constituent (a clause or a verb) is understood as finite
or non-finite.
focus: the stressed element in a sentence that carries new information.
focus fronting: focus can be indicated either by stress alone or by movement in
which latter case we speak about focus fronting, as the constituent that bears
focus stress moves to the front of the clause, as in Peter I wouldn't trust
foot of a chain: the lowest position an element has been moved from containing the
trace of the moved constituent; the extraction site of the moved element.
force: the distinction between a declarative and an interrogative interpretation
of sentences.
free morpheme: a morpheme that can stand on its own, e.g. flower, walk. See also
bound morpheme
functional category: categories without lexical content, fulfilling some grammatical
function in a given structure: inflections, determiners, degree
adverbs and complementisers.
gender: the contrast between masculine and feminine, or (in some languages)
animate and inanimate nominal expressions.
generative grammar: a grammar containing rules with the help of which we can
generate all and only the well-formed expressions of a language
(therefore excluding the ungrammatical structures).
genitive Case: in traditional terminology the ’s ending on a nominal expression (e.g. in
Peter’s dog) is assumed to be the marker of genitive Case.
gerund: a verb form with a noun-like role in the sentence retaining characteristics
of both verbs and nouns as in [The patient's refusing of the medicine]
worried the doctors.
government: a structural relationship between a head and its complement.
Government is a necessary condition for case-assignment.
Government and Binding Theory (GB): a version of Noam Chomsky's universal
grammar according to which linguistic expressions, though infinite in
number, can be generated with the help of a restricted number of rules.
Grammatical expressions are the result of several interacting modules
within this system.
gradable adjective: an adjective that has comparative and superlative forms, e.g.
nice/nicer/nicest.
grammar: (a) a (finite) set of rules which tell us how to recognise the infinite number
of expressions that constitute the language that we speak. (b) a linguistic
hypothesis about these rules.
grammatical aspect: refers to how the event is viewed as a process: whether it has
stopped (perfect aspect) or is still going on (progressive aspect).
head: a word level or zero level category. It projects its properties to the
phrase (XP) via the X', so that the category of X is the same as X' and XP.
The head defines the properties of the phrase. Heads also impose
restrictions on the type of the complement that can follow them.