1. syntax: A branch of linguistics that studies how words are combined to form sentences and the rules that govern the formation of sentences.

2. category: It refers to a group of linguistic items which fulfill the same or similar functions in a particular language such as a sentence, a noun phrase or a verb.

3. syntactic categories: Words can be grouped together into a relatively small number of classes, called syntactic categories.

4. major lexical category: one type of word level categories, which often assumed to be the heads around which phrases are built, including N, V, Adj, and Prep.

5. minor lexical category: one type of word level categories, which helps or modifies major lexical category.

6. phrase: syntactic units that are built around a certain word category are called phrase, the category of which is determined by the word category around which the phrase is built.

7. phrase category: the phrase that is formed by combining with words of different categories. In English syntactic analysis, four phrasal categories are commonly recognized and discussed, namely, NP, VP, PP, AP.

8. head: The word round which phrase is formed is termed head.

9. specifier: The words on the left side of the heads are said to function as specifiers.

10. complement: The words on the right side of the heads are complements.

11. phrase structure rule:The special type of grammatical mechanism that regulates the arrangement of elements that make up a phrase is called a phrase structure rule.

12. XP rule: In all phrases, the specifier is attached at the top level to the left of the head while the complement is attached to the right. These similarities can be summarized as an XP rule, in which X stands for the head N,V,A or P.

13. X^ theory: A theoretical concept in transformational grammar which restricts the form of context-free phrases structure rules.

14. coordination: Some structures are formed by joining two or more elements of the same type with the help of a conjunction such as and or or. Such phenomenon is known as coordination.

15. subcategorization: The information about a word’s complement is included in the head and termed suncategorization. (07C)

16. complementizer: Words which introduce the sentence complement are termed complementizer.

17. complement clause: The sentence introduced by the complementizer is called a complement clause.

18. complement phrase: the elements, including a complementizer and a complement clause is called a complement phrase.

19. matrix clause: the contrusction in which the complement phrase is embedded is called matrix clause.

20. modifier: the element, which specifies optionally expressible properties of heads is called modifier.

21. transformation : a special type of rule that can move an element from one position to another.

22. inversion : the process of transformation that moves the auxiliary from the Infl position to a position to the left of the subject, is called inversion.

23. Do insertion : In the process of forming yes-no question that does not contain an overt Infl, interrogative do is inserted into an empty Infl positon to make transformation work.

24. deep structure : A level of abstract syntactic representation formed by the XP rule.

25. surface structure : A level of syntactic representation after applying the necessary syntactic movement, i.e., transformation, to the deep structure. (05)

26. Wh question : In English, the kind of questions beginning with a wh- word are called wh question.

27. Wh movement :The transformation that will move wh phrase from its position in deep structure to a position at the beginning of the sentence. This transformation is called wh movement.

28. move α: a general rule for all the movement rules, where ‘alpha‘ is a cover term foe any element that can be moved from one place to another.