Basic English Syntax with Exercises

daughter

2.1.5 Structural terminology

Finally, it is often useful to talk about two or more nodes in a tree and their relationships to each other. For this purpose a syntactic tree is seen like a family tree with the nodes representing different family members. For some reason however, these families are made up of women only. A node which has immediate constituents is called the mother of those constituents and the constituents are its daughters. Two nodes which have the same mother are sisters.

2.1.7 Rules

The rule states that a sentence is made up of some words and some sentences. Although this rule is not particularly accurate, we can see that this kind of rule is ideal for describing the kinds of structures we have been discussing, as they state what the immediate constituents of a structure are: in other words, this rule describes mother–daughter relationships.

3.1.5.1 Adjunction to X-bar

The part of the structure containing the AP is recursive with an N' as the mother and an N' as one of the daughters. This means that there is room for more APs, as demonstrated by (36):

3.1.6 Summary

The three X-bar rules introduce three elements besides the head. The complement is introduced as the sister of the head. It always follows the head and is restricted by the head’s subcategorisation requirements. Thus, if a head selects for a PP complement, the complement must be a PP. The specifier is introduced as the sister to X' and daughter of XP. Specifiers precede the head and are restricted to one per phrase. The last element of the phrase, the adjunct, can be introduced at any X-bar level: X, X' and XP. This element expands what it is adjoined to into another element of the same type. Therefore the process is recursive and in principle any number of adjuncts can be added to a structure.