Basic English Syntax with Exercises

immediate constituent

2.1.5 Structural terminology

Now that we have introduced the notion of structure, we need some terms to use to refer to aspects of structures and the way we can represent them. The notion of structure entails that there are elements of a sentence that themselves are made up of other elements and indeed that these other elements may be made up of yet more elements, and so on and so on. The elements that make up a larger part of the structure are called its constituents and the constituents that directly make up a part of structure are called its immediate constituents. Thus, in a phrase such as the following, the verb and its complement phrase are its immediate constituents. Everything inside the complement phrase is a constituent of the whole phrase, though not an immediate constituent:

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.

2.1.5 Structural terminology

The way this works is that each constituent is surrounded by square brackets and so a constituent can be determined by finding an open bracket ‘[’ to its left and the corresponding close bracket ‘]’ to the right. Thus, the postwoman in (29) is defined as a constituent as it has an open bracket immediately to its left and a close bracket immediately to its right.

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.

2.2.1 The subject

From a structural point of view, the argument that precedes the verb also differs from the other arguments. This argument is an immediate constituent of the sentence, whereas all other arguments are inside the verb phrase:

3.1.1 Rewrite rules and some terminology

There are several things to note about this structure. First there are two immediate constituents of the X' (pronounced “X bar”): X, which is called the head of the phrase and the complement YP. The complement, which, as its label suggests is a phrase of any possible category, follows the head. This is a fact about English and in other languages the complement may precede the head.

3.1.1 Rewrite rules and some terminology

Again there are several things to note about this structure. Once more, there are two immediate constituents of the phrase. The specifier, a phrase of any category, precedes the X', the constituent just discussed containing the head and the complement. Again the ordering of these two constituents is language dependent: specifiers precede X's in English, but this is not necessarily so in all languages. Specifiers are a little more difficult to exemplify than complements due to complications that we have yet to discuss. However, the following are fairly straightforward cases:

3.1.5 Adjuncts

This is different from the previous two rules in a number of ways. First, the previous rules specified the possible constituents of the various specific projections of the head: complements are immediate constituents of X' and specifiers are immediate constituents of XP. The adjunction rule in (30) is more general as it states the possible constituents of an Xn, that is, an X with any number of bars. In other words, Xn stands for XP (=X''), X' or X (=X0). The adjunct itself is defined either as a word (Y) or as a phrase (YP) and we will see that which of these is relevant depends on the status of Xn: if Xn is a word, then the adjunct is a word, if not then the adjunct is a phrase.