All definitions are taken from:

Tserdanelis, Georgios and Wai Yi Peggy Wong. Language Files: Materials for an Introduction

to Language and Linguistics. Columbus: Ohio UP, 2004.

Syntax
1. Syntax	Ways words are combined to form sentences to express complex thoughts.
2. Grammatical	A sentence that is judged to be possible by native speakers
3. Hierarchical	Words are put together in a hierarchical structure…meaning words make phrases and phrases make sentences. This is proved by the fact that there is ambiguity, b/c otherwise a group of words could only mean one thing.
4. Ambiguity	1 form with more than 1 meaning. Types: Lexical: same expression or phrase or word can mean 2 different things. Pragmatic: same sentence means 2 different things, based on language used in context…the meanings depend upon what context they’re used in. Structural: there is ambiguity in the way the sentence was put together. You can bracket it off to show the two different meanings.
5. Semantic roles	Agent, patient, instrument, theme, experiencer, source, recipient…does not change regardless of where it appears in the sentence. Robin frightens me. And I fear Robin…Robin remains the source in both sentences and I/me remain the experiencer.
5. Structure	Grammatical and nongrammatical…nongrammatical is marked with an *. Syntax doesn’t care about meaning…therefore, a sentence is only marked with an * if it is ungrammatical, regardless of whether it makes sense or not.
4. Universal Grammar	The system of categories, operations, and principles that are shared by all languages.
5. Lexicon	Mental dictionary that provides a list of the language’s words along with information about each word’s pronunciation, form, and meaning.
6. Computational system	A system that can carry out operations on words to combine them and arrange them in particular ways.
7. Merge	Combines elements to create phrases and sentences
8. Move	Transports an element to a new position within a particular sentence.
9. Syntactic categories	The categories in which words in all human languages can be grouped together into a relatively small number of classes, including the type of meaning that words express, the type of affixes that they take, and the type of structures in which they can occur.
10. Lexical categories	Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Prepositions, Adverbs Only ones that can be heads of phrases, except for adverb.
11. Nonlexical or functional categories	Determiners, Auxiliary verbs, Conjunctions, and degree words, which have meanings that are generally harder to define and paraphrase than those of the lexical category.
12. Nouns	Typically name entities, including individuals and objects
13. Verbs	Designate actions, sensations, and states
14. Adjectives	Designate a property or attribute of the entities denoted by nouns.
15. Adverbs	Denote properties and attributes of the actions, sensations, and states designated by verbs.
16. Distribution	The type of elements (especially functional categories) with which a word can co-occur.
17. Hierarchical word order	Words are grouped together into successively larger structural units.
18. Phrases	The units that stand between words and sentences in syntactic structure.
19. Head	The nucleus around which phrases are built and may form a phrase all by itself…can only come from the lexical categories.
20. Specifiers	Determiners (the and a), qualifiers (never and often), and degree words (quite or almost) that help to make the meaning of the head more precise and typically mark a phrase boundary.
21. Complement	A phrase that provides info about entities and locations whose existence is implied by the meaning of the head. Means that it is required!
22. Adjunct	What comes after the head of a phrase that is not required.
23. Transitive	A verb that takes a direct object.
24. Phrase structure rule	Used to describe the composition of phrases. Example: NP à (Det) N (PP)
25. Phrase structure schema	The blueprint of a sentence’s phrasal structure that applies to all phrases. XP à (Specifier) X (Complement if required) and/or (Adjunct not required)
26. Sentence	The largest unit of syntactic analysis that traditionally consist of a NP (Subject) and a VP (Predicate) made up of phrases which are made up of words.
27. I category	Used to designate the sentences tense and includes auxiliary verbs such as can, will, may.
28. Constituents	Syntactic units
29. Substitution test	You can test to see if a group of words in a sentence is a phrase by substituting something for it, such as they, it, there or do so.
30. Movement test	You can test to see if a group of words in a sentence is a phrase by moving it as a single unit to another part of the sentence.
31. Coordination test	You can test to see if a group of words in a sentence is a phrase by seeing if it can be joined with another group of words by a conjunction.
32. Coordinate structures	Patterns built around a conjunction.
33. Merge	Combine words in a manner compatible with the phrase structure schema.
34. Subcategorization	Used to refer to information about a word’s compliment options. If something is subcategorized it means that it is required.