Basic English Syntax with Exercises

mother

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

So to refer to the tree in (28) again, the top P node is the mother of the verb and the P node which represents the verb’s complement. The verb and the complement P node are therefore sisters. The complement P node is also a mother to the pronoun his and the noun decision and again these two nodes 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):