LINGUIS 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Lexical Semantics, Cleft Sentence, Principle Of Compositionality
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Certain groups of expressions within a larger phrase can form a syntactic unit -- a syntactic constituent. The syntactic constituents of a phrasal expression are the smaller expressions out of which the phrase was constructed. (cid:523)(cid:498)an apple(cid:499) in (cid:498)sally devoured an apple(cid:499) is a. You can omit an entire sc and still have a sentence, but omitting one individually syntactic constituent). results in ungrammaticality. Scs of a sentence reveal the syntactic structure of that sentence; they show how the sentence was built out of smaller expressions: answers to questions. One way to determine whether words are an sc is to construct a question based on the sentence and see if the string of words you"re testing can serve as an answer. On the desk/ sleeping on the desk: clefting. Another constituency test involves constructing a cleft, a kind of sentence in which some constituent is displaced (or moved) to the left.
