语言学课后答案4

1.

syntax: the study of the rules governing the ways different constituents are combined to form sentences in a language, or the study of the interrelationships between elements in sentence structures.

co-occurrence: It means that words of different sets of clauses may permit, or require, the occurrence of a word of another set or class to form a sentence or a particular part of a sentence. For instance, what can precede a noun (dog) is usually the determiners and adjectives, and what can follow it when it takes the position of subject will be predicators such as bark, bite, run, etc. In short, co-occurrence is the syntactic environment in which a construction, with its relevant elements, can appear grammatically and conventionally. Thus relations of co-occurrence partly belong to syntagmatic relations, partly to paradigmatic relations.

construction: it refers to any syntactic construct which is assigned one or more conventional functions in a language, together with whatever is linguistically conventionalized about its contribution to the meaning or use construct contains. It can be further divided into the external and internal properties. Take sentence The boy kicked the ball as an example, we will determine the external syntax as an independent

clause, whi le NP (―the boy‖), VP (―kicked‖) and NP (―the ball‖) will be assigned respectively to the different elements in this clause. constituent: Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents together form a construction: for example, in the sentence The boy ate the apple,S (A), the boy (B), ate the apple(C), each part is a constituent. Constituents can be joined together with other constituents to form larger units. If two constituents, in the case of the example above, B (the boy) and C (ate the apple), are joined to form a hierarchically higher constituent A (―S‖, here a sentence), then B and C are said to be immediate constituents of A.

endocentric: Endocentric construction is one whose distribution is functionally equivalent to that of one or more of its constituents, i.e., a word or a group of words, which serves as a definable Centre or Head. In the phrase two pretty girls, girls is the Centre or Head of this phrase or word group.

exocentric: Exocentric construction refers to a group of syntactically related words where none of the words is functionally equivalent to the group as a whole, that is, there is no definable "Centre" or "Head" inside the group. Exocentric construction usually includes basic sentence, prepositional phrase, predicate (verb + object) construction, and