Basic English Syntax with Exercises

tree diagram

2.1.5 Structural terminology

This kind of representation of grammatical structure is called a tree diagram, though unlike real trees, grammatical trees tend to grow downwards. The elements that make up the tree, the words and phrases etc. are called nodes and the lines that join the nodes are branches.

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.

2.1.5 Structural terminology

It would of course be possible to define the relationships ‘grandmother’, ‘aunt’, ‘cousin’ etc. for any given tree diagram. However these relationships tend not to be very important for syntactic processes and so we will not consider them.

2.1.5 Structural terminology

Admittedly, it is harder to see the structure of a sentence when represented with brackets than with a tree, as it takes some working out which open brackets go along with which close bracket. However, bracketings are a lot more convenient to use, especially if we only want to concentrate on certain aspects of a structure. So, for example, above we represented an embedded sentence using brackets:

2.1.5 Structural terminology

The bracketing in (29) is not entirely equivalent to the tree diagram in (16) as in the tree the nodes have labels that tell us what they represent, phrases or sentences. We can add labels to brackets to make the two representations equivalent. With bracketing, the label is usually placed on the open bracket of the constituent:

2.1.5 Structural terminology

Again, this adds to the complexity of the representation and so it is not as clear as the tree diagram. But providing it is not too complex, it is still a useful way to represent structural details.

2.1.7 Rules

Such rules are known as rewrite rules as they describe how to draw a tree by ‘re-writing’ the symbol on the left of the arrow for the symbols on the right. Thus, if we start with the S at the top of the tree diagram we can rewrite this as a DP and a VP. The VP can be re-written as a verb, a DP and a PP and the PP as a preposition and a DP. The DPs can then be re-written as determiners followed by nouns.

2.3.4 Single-word phrases

The situation is easy enough to represent in terms of a tree diagram:

8.1.1 Clauses without CP

Recall from chapter 6 that the notion of government, which is relevant for Case assignment, imposes a restriction on what can be governed in that an element can govern ‘up to a point’. We left undefined what that point was in our previous discussion, but now it is important to be more precise. There are a number of ways that we might think of doing this, but one of the most intuitive is to suppose that certain nodes in a tree form barriers to government in that they ‘protect’ their constituents from government from the outside. Thus a governor may be able to govern up to a barrier, but not through a barrier. We know that a light verb can assign Case to the specifier of the VP, as this is the normal configuration in which accusative Case is assigned: