Glossarymorphological case: there is a morphologically visible indication of Case on the
nominal expression (DP). In English case is not visible on lexical DPs,
only in the pronoun system with several examples of case syncretism
(he/him, she/her, but it, you)
morphology: the study of words and how words are structured.
mother: a node directly above another node.
Move : move anything anywhere. Further restrictions on movement come from
factors independent from the formulation of the movement rule.
movement: S-structure constituents do not always appear in the position where
they are base-generated in D-structure, they often move from their
base positions to other structural positions. There can be various reasons
motivating movement, see wh-movement and DP-movement.
multiple light verb: the internal structure of the VP and the structure of the event
expressed by the verb are isomorphic. If the event structure of the
predicate is complex we have multiple light verbs in the structure. Light
verbs can also express tense and aspect
multiple wh-question: a single question that asks for more than one piece of
information hence contains more than one wh-element, e.g. Who did you
say said what?
[±N]: one of the three basic binary features on which all categories can be
defined. With the help of these features we can explain why we have the
categories that we do and also describe how these categories are related.
With the help of the three binary features we can predict what kinds of
categories are possible in human language, we can give an exclusive list
of them. Since we want to define verbs and nouns as polar opposites the
abstract binary features [±N] and [±V] were introduced, though obviously
they do not mean noun and verb and are used to define other categories
besides nouns and verbs. A property linked to the [–N] feature is the ability
to have a nominal complement. The categories with [+N] feature are the
following: a. thematic: nouns, adjectives; b. functional:
determiners, degree adverbs; unspecified for the [F] value: post-
determiners, measure nouns.
negative fronting: a movement type where a negative element is placed at the
beginning of the clause as in Never have I met such a talented musician!
node: a symbol defining syntactic units (heads, intermediate constituents,
phrases) connected by branches in a tree structure representation.
nominative Case: the Case assigned to DPs in the subject position of finite
clauses. The Case assigner is the finite Inflectional head.
non-defining relative clause: see non-restrictive relative clause.
non-finite clause: a clause in which no finite verb is present.
non-finite verb form: a verb form without independent tense interpretation. In the
sentences I want to walk and I wanted to walk the embedded clause to
walk is non-finite, its tense interpretation depends on the matrix clauses.
non-referential: without reference. In the sentence There are 24 students in the group
the expletive there is non-referential as opposed to there in She was
standing there.