Glossaryheadless relative: a relative clause that does not appear to be a modifier inside a
nominal phrase as it appears without a noun, however it can be argued to
function as such, like in I spoke to [whoever I met].
Head Movement Constraint (HMC): a head must move to the next head position.
head of a chain: the position an element moves to, its final landing site.
heavy DP-shift: when the DP is particularly long and complicated, it may undergo
extraposition: You can post today [all the letters you have written in the
past five days]./*You can post today them.
HMC: see Head Movement Constraint.
idiosyncratic: not predictable. The idiosyncratic properties of e.g. words are those that
are specific to that word, such as its phonological form, meaning and
subcategorisation frame. These properties cannot be described with the
help of rules, so they must be encoded in the lexicon.
I-language: the language which is internal to the mind; a finite system that linguists
try to model with grammars.
immediate constituent: the immediate constituent of a node is the node that is
lower than the given constituent and is connected to it by a single
branch. It is the constituent directly below the node it is the immediate
constituent of.
imperative: a structure used to express a request or command. An imperative sentence
usually has no visible subject: Eat your breakfast, please.
implicit argument: an argument that is not present in the syntactic structure but
understood. In the sentence I am eating the transitive verb eating has no
visible object, still, the sentence means that something is eaten.
indefinite determiner: a determiner like a or some turning a nominal expression
into an indefinite DP.
indirect object: one of the objects of e.g. the verb give in the double object
construction assigned the theta-role of beneficiary.
infinitive: a non-finite, uninflected verb form either with or without to.
inflection: (a) a morpheme added to the end of words of a given category in
sentence structure as required by the given structure, e.g. -s in Peter like-s
his dog or -er in Peter is clever-er than Tony.
(b) the head of an Inflectional Phrase. It can be realised as a modal
auxiliary or a zero agreement morpheme. Information about tense can be
found in a separate vP directly under IP.
inflectional comparison: the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective are
expressed with the help of the inflectional endings -er and -est. E.g.
hungrier/hungriest. See also periphrastic comparison.
inflectional morpheme: it does not change the category of the lexical element to
which it is added, it provides another form of the word, e.g. the past
inflectional morpheme -ed. The meaning of the original word does not
change. Syntactic process.
inflectional phrase (IP): in traditional grammars the IP is a phrase headed by an
inflectional element which can be a modal auxiliary (e.g. may, should,
will), infinitival to or the bound morphemes expressing tense (-ed, -s)
the latter undergoing Affix Lowering to form a unit with the verb. In the