Syntactic Terms
Basic terms for sentence structure.
Terms for describing sentence structure: subject, predicate, object, clause, phrase, modifier and complement, plus adjuncts, heads, arguments, noun and verb phrases, transitivity, agreement, voice, coordination and relative clauses.
Use it when
- You need a definition of a syntactic term for parsing or teaching.
- You are analyzing how the parts of a sentence relate.
Watch out for
- Different syntactic theories define some terms differently; the entries give the common descriptive meaning.
- Examples refer to English structure; other languages mark relations by case or word order differently.
The data
19 rows
| Term | Description |
|---|---|
| Subject | The noun phrase about which the sentence says something. |
| Predicate | The part of the sentence containing the verb and objects. |
| Object | The noun phrase affected by the verb. |
| Clause | A group of words containing a subject and predicate. |
| Phrase | A group of words that functions as a single unit. |
| Modifier | A word or phrase that describes or limits another. |
| Complement | A word or phrase that completes the predicate. |
| Head | The word that determines the category and main properties of a phrase, such as the noun in a noun phrase. |
| Argument | A phrase required by a predicate to complete its meaning, such as the object of a transitive verb. |
| Adjunct | An optional phrase that adds information such as time, place or manner. |
| Noun Phrase | A phrase headed by a noun, such as 'the old house'. |
| Verb Phrase | A phrase headed by a verb, including its objects and modifiers. |
| Transitive Verb | A verb that takes a direct object. |
| Intransitive Verb | A verb that does not take a direct object. |
| Agreement | Matching of a word's form to another, such as subject-verb agreement in number. |
| Passive Voice | A construction in which the subject receives the action, as in 'The ball was thrown'. |
| Subordinate Clause | A clause that depends on a main clause and cannot stand alone. |
| Coordination | Linking elements of equal status with conjunctions such as 'and' or 'or'. |
| Relative Clause | A clause that modifies a noun, introduced by who, which or that. |
Fields
The shape of this dataset, read from the data itself: every column, its type and a real value. Agents can use this to plan a query without fetching the whole document.
| Section | Field | Type | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| data | term | string | Subject |
| data | description | string | The noun phrase about which the sentence says s… |
Fetch the same bytes
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curl "https://yjtoon.com/api/dataset/syntactic-terms?format=toon"
const res = await fetch( "https://yjtoon.com/static-data/dataset/syntactic-terms.toon" ); const toon = await res.text();
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