Adjunct (grammar)
In linguistics, an adjunct is an optional, or structurally dispensable, part of a sentence, clause, or phrase that, if removed or discarded, will not otherwise affect the remainder of the sentence. Example: In the sentence John helped Bill in Central Park, the phrase in Central Park is an adjunct. A more detailed definition of the adjunct emphasizes its attribute as a modifying form, word, or phrase that depends on another form, word, or phrase, being an element of clause structure with adverbial function. An adjunct is not an argument, an argument is not an adjunct; the argument–adjunct distinction is central in most theories of syntax and semantics. The terminology used to denote arguments and adjuncts can vary depending on the theory at hand; some dependency grammars, for instance, employ the term circonstant, following Tesnière. The area of grammar that explores the nature of predicates, their arguments, adjuncts is called valency theory. Predicates have valency; the valency of predicates is investigated in terms of subcategorization.
Take the sentence John helped Bill in Central Park on Sunday as an example: John is the subject argument. Helped is the predicate. Bill is the object argument. In Central Park is the first adjunct. on Sunday is the second adjunct. An adverbial adjunct is a sentence element that establishes the circumstances in which the action or state expressed by the verb takes place; the following sentence uses adjuncts of time and place: Yesterday, Lorna saw the dog in the garden. Notice that this example is ambiguous between whether the adjunct in the garden modifies the verb saw or the noun phrase the dog; the definition can be extended to include adjuncts that modify other parts of speech. An adjunct can be a phrase, or an entire clause. Single word She will leave tomorrow. Phrase She will leave in the morning. Clause She will leave. Most discussions of adjuncts focus on adverbial adjuncts, that is, on adjuncts that modify verbs, verb phrases, or entire clauses like the adjuncts in the three examples just given.
Adjuncts can appear in other domains, however. An adnominal adjunct is one that modifies a noun: for a list of possible types of these, see Components of noun phrases. Adjuncts that modify adjectives and adverbs are called adadjectival and adadverbial; the discussion before the game – before the game is an adnominal adjunct. Very happy – is an "adadjectival" adjunct. Too loudly – too is an "adadverbial" adjunct. Adjuncts are always constituents; each of the adjuncts in the examples throughout this article is a constituent. Adjuncts can be categorized in terms of the functional meaning that they contribute to the phrase, clause, or sentence in which they appear; the following list of the semantic functions is by no means exhaustive, but it does include most of the semantic functions of adjuncts identified in the literature on adjuncts: Causal – Causal adjuncts establish the reason for, or purpose of, an action or state. The ladder collapsed. Concessive – Concessive adjuncts establish contrary circumstances.
Lorna went out. Conditional – Conditional adjuncts establish the condition in which an action occurs or state holds. I would go to Paris. Consecutive – Consecutive adjuncts establish an effect or result, it rained so hard. Final – Final adjuncts establish the goal of an action, he works a lot to earn money for school. Instrumental – Instrumental adjuncts establish the instrument used to accomplish an action. Mr. Bibby wrote the letter with a pencil. Locative – Locative adjuncts establish where, to where, or from where a state or action happened or existed, she sat on the table. Measure – Measure adjuncts establish the measure of the action, state, or quality that they modify I am finished; that is true. We want to stay in part. Modal – Modal adjuncts establish the extent to which the speaker views the action or state as probable, they left. In any case, we didn't do it; that is possible. I'm going to the party. Modificative – Modificative adjuncts establish how the action happened or the state existed, he ran with difficulty.
He stood in silence. He helped me with my homework. Temporal – Temporal adjuncts establish when, how long, or how frequent the action or state happened or existed, he arrived yesterday. He stayed for two weeks, she drinks in that bar every day. The distinction between arguments and adjuncts and predicates is central to most theories of syntax and grammar. Predicates take arguments and they permit adjuncts; the arguments of a predicate are necessary to complete the meaning of the predicate. The adjuncts of a predicate, in contrast, provide auxiliary information about the core predicate-argument meaning, which means they are not necessary to complete the meaning of the predicate. Adjuncts and arguments can be identified using various diagnostics; the omission diagnostic, for instance, helps identify many arguments and thus indirectly many adjuncts as well. If a given constituent cannot be omitted from a sentence, clause, or phrase without resulting in an unacceptable expression, that constituent is NOT an adjunct, e.g. a.
Fred knows. B. Fred knows. – may be an adjunct.a. He stayed after class. B, he stayed. – after class may be an adjun
Argument (linguistics)
In linguistics, an argument is an expression that helps complete the meaning of a predicate, the latter referring in this context to a main verb and its auxiliaries. In this regard, the complement is a related concept. Most predicates take two, or three arguments. A predicate and its arguments form a predicate-argument structure; the discussion of predicates and arguments is associated most with verbs and noun phrases, although other syntactic categories can be construed as predicates and as arguments. Arguments must be distinguished from adjuncts. While a predicate needs its arguments to complete its meaning, the adjuncts that appear with a predicate are optional. Most theories of syntax and semantics acknowledge arguments and adjuncts, although the terminology varies, the distinction is believed to exist in all languages. Dependency grammars sometimes call arguments actants, following Tesnière; the area of grammar that explores the nature of predicates, their arguments, adjuncts is called valency theory.
Predicates have a valence. The valence of predicates is investigated in terms of subcategorization; the basic analysis of the syntax and semantics of clauses relies on the distinction between arguments and adjuncts. The clause predicate, a content verb, demands certain arguments; that is, the arguments are necessary in order to complete the meaning of the verb. The adjuncts that appear, in contrast, are not necessary in this sense; the subject phrase and object phrase are the two most occurring arguments of verbal predicates. For instance: Jill likes Jack. Sam fried the meat; the old man helped the young man. Each of these sentences contains two arguments, the first noun being the subject argument, the second the object argument. Jill, for example, is the subject argument of the predicate likes, Jack is its object argument. Verbal predicates that demand just a subject argument are intransitive, verbal predicates that demand an object argument as well are transitive, verbal predicates that demand two object arguments are ditransitive.
When additional information is added to our three example sentences, one is dealing with adjuncts, e.g. Jill likes Jack. Jill likes Jack most of the time. Jill likes Jack. Jill likes Jack; the added phrases are adjuncts. One key difference between arguments and adjuncts is that the appearance of a given argument is obligatory, whereas adjuncts appear optionally. While typical verb arguments are subject or object nouns or noun phrases as in the examples above, they can be prepositional phrases; the PPs in bold in the following sentences are arguments: Sam put the pen on the chair. Larry does not put up with that. Bill is getting on my case. We know that these PPs are arguments because when we attempt to omit them, the result is unacceptable: *Sam put the pen. *Larry does not put up. *Bill is getting. Subject and object arguments are known as core arguments. Prepositional arguments, which are called oblique arguments, however, do not tend to undergo the same processes. Psycholinguistic theories must explain how syntactic representations are built incrementally during sentence comprehension.
One view that has sprung from psycholinguistics is the argument structure hypothesis, which explains the distinct cognitive operations for argument and adjunct attachment: arguments are attached via the lexical mechanism, but adjuncts are attached using general grammatical knowledge, represented as phrase structure rules or the equivalent. Argument status determines the cognitive mechanism in which a phrase will be attached to the developing syntactic representations of a sentence. Psycholinguistic evidence supports a formal distinction between arguments and adjuncts, for any questions about the argument status of a phrase are, in effect, questions about learned mental representations of the lexical heads. An important distinction acknowledges both semantic arguments. Content verbs determine the number and type of syntactic arguments that can or must appear in their environment; these syntactic functions will vary. In languages that have morphological case, the arguments of a predicate must appear with the correct case markings imposed on them by their predicate.
The semantic arguments of the predicate, in contrast, remain consistent, e.g. Jack is liked by Jill. Jill's liking Jack Jack's being liked by Jill the liking of Jack by Jill Jill's like for JackThe predicate'like' appears in various forms in these examples, which means that the syntactic functions of the arguments associated with Jack and Jill vary; the object of the active sentence, for instance, becomes the subject of the passive sentence. Despite this variation in syntactic functions, the arguments remain semantically consistent. In each case, Jill is the experiencer and Jack is the one being experienced
Adjective phrase
An adjective phrase is a phrase the head word of, an adjective, e.g. fond of steak happy, quite upset about it, etc. The adjective can conclude the phrase, or appear in a medial position; the dependents of the head adjective—i.e. The other words and phrases inside the adjective phrase—are adverb or prepositional phrases, but they can be clauses. Adjectives and adjective phrases function in two basic ways, attributively or predicatively. An attributive adjective precedes the noun of a noun phrase. A predicative adjective serves to describe the preceding subject, e.g.. The man is happy; the adjective phrases are underlined in the following example sentences. The head adjective in each of these phrases is in bold, how the adjective phrase is functioning—attributively or predicatively—is stated to the right of each example:. Sentences can contain tremendously long phrases. – Attributive adjective phrase. This sentence is not tremendously long. – Predicative adjective phrase. A player faster than you was on their team gaining weight.
– Attributive adjective phrase. He is faster than you. – Predicative adjective phrase. Sam ordered a spicy but quite small pizza. – Attributive adjective phrases. The pizza is spicy but quite small. – Predicative adjective phrases. People angry with the high prices were protesting. – Attributive adjective phrase. The people are angry with the high prices. – Predicative adjective phraseThe distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an attributive adjective alone precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man, whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g. a man proud of his children. A predicative adjective, in contrast, appears outside of the noun phrase that it describes after a linking verb, e.g. The man is proud of his children. There is a tendency to call a phrase an adjectival phrase when that phrase is functioning like an adjective phrase, but is not headed by an adjective.
For example, in Mr Clinton is a man of wealth, the prepositional phrase of wealth modifies a man in a manner similar to how an adjective phrase would, it can be reworded with an adjective, e.g. Mr Clinton is a wealthy man. A more accurate term for such cases is phrasal attributive phrase. Constituency tests can be used to identify adjectives and adjective phrases. Here are the three constituency tests, according to X-bar theory, that prove the adjective phrase is both a constituent, an AP. Sentence = Sam ordered a spicy pizza. 1) Coordination tests can be used to confirm if spicy is an adjective phrase. Test 1: Sam ordered a spicy quite small pizza; this phrase passed the coordination test because it was grammatical, the adjective phrases were not creating ambiguous meanings when a conjunction is used. 2) Ellipsis tests can be be used to confirm if spicy is an adjective phrase. Test 2: Sam ordered a spicy pizza, but the pizza Betty ordered was not spicy; this phrase passed the Ellipsis test, because no ambiguity is created and the adjective phrase could be elided.
3) Movement test pseudoclefting, can be used to confirm if spicy is an adjective phrase. Test 3: Sam ordered a spicy pizza, spicy. Movement tests not only prove that the constituent moved is a stand-alone constituent, but proves that this phrase spicy is an AP if drawn in a syntax tree. Thus, because this adjective phrase could be moved to the right, it's sufficient proof that it is both a constituent and an adjective phrase. Although constituency tests can prove the existence of an AP in a sentence, the meanings of these AP may be ambiguous; this ambiguity must be considered. The following examples prove two things: Adjective phrases that are pre-nominal create ambiguous interpretations. Head adjectives. Note: This section can be added into the adjectives page, but ambiguity can apply to adjective phrases. Additionally, comma placements and intonations may have a role in figuring out ambiguity, but English has a written form of communication, more ambiguous than spoken communication; the following examples show the different interpretive properties of pre- and post-nominal adjectives which are inside adjective phrases.
1) Intersective versus non-intersective a. Ambiguous sentence: I’ve never met a more beautiful dancer than Mary Interpretation 1: I’ve never met a dancer, more beautiful than Mary Interpretation 2: I’ve never met anyone dancing more beautifully than Mary b. Unambiguous sentence: I’ve never met a dancer more beautiful than Mary Interpretation 1: I’ve never met a dancer, more beautiful than Mary *Interpretation 2: I’ve never met anyone dancing more beautifully than Mary This example showed entire adjective phrase moving, creating the same ambiguity as example 1. Therefore, the placement of the adjective relative to the subject is important for creating unambiguous statements. A. Ambiguous sentence: All the short blessed people were healed. Interpretation 1: All the short people were healed Interpretation 2: Only the people that were short and blessed were healed b. Unambiguous sen
Determiner phrase
In linguistics, a determiner phrase is a type of phrase posited by some theories of syntax. The head of a DP is a determiner, as opposed to a noun. For example in the phrase the car, the is a car is a noun; the existence of DPs is a controversial issue in the study of syntax. The traditional analysis of phrases such as the car is that the noun is the head, which means the phrase is a noun phrase, not a determiner phrase. Beginning in the mid 1980s, an alternative analysis arose that posits the determiner as the head, which makes the phrase a DP instead of an NP; the DP-analysis of phrases such as the car is the majority view in generative grammar today. Most frameworks outside of generative grammar continue to assume the traditional NP analysis of noun phrases. For instance, representational phrase structure grammars assume NP, e.g. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, most dependency grammars such as Meaning-Text Theory, Functional Generative Description, Lexicase Grammar assume the traditional NP-analysis of noun phrases, Word Grammar being the one exception.
Construction Grammar and Role and Reference Grammar assume NP instead of DP. Furthermore, the DP-analysis does not reach into the teaching of grammar in schools in the English-speaking world, not in the non-English-speaking world. Since the existence of DPs is a controversial issue that splits the syntax community into two camps, this article strives to accommodate both views; some arguments supporting/refuting both analyses are considered. Furthermore, this article strives to discuss the DP in different contexts, which includes how it is realized in languages without overt determiners, as well as how it is realized when there is code switching involved; the point at issue concerns the hierarchical status of determiners. Various types of determiners in English are summarized in the following table: Should the determiner in phrases such as the car and those ideas be construed as the head of or as a dependent in the phrase? The following trees illustrate the competing analyses, DP vs. NP; the two possibilities are illustrated first using dependency-based structures: The a-examples show the determiners dominating the nouns, the b-examples reverse the relationship, since the nouns dominate the determiners.
The same distinction is illustrated next using constituency-based trees: The convention used here employs the words themselves as the labels on the nodes in the structure. Whether a dependency-based or constituency-based approach to syntax is employed, the issue is the same; the constituency-based analysis is doing the same thing as the dependency-based analysis. The following subsections consider some of the observations and arguments that motivate the DP-analysis. Four points are considered: 1) parallelism across syntactic domains, 2) the position of the determiner, 3) the nature of possessive's in English, 4) the nature of pronouns; the original motivation for the DP-analysis came in the form of parallelism across phrase and clause. The DP-analysis provides a basis for viewing phrases as structurally parallel; the basic insight runs along the following lines: since clauses have functional categories above lexical categories, noun phrases should do the same. The traditional NP-analysis has the drawback that it positions the determiner, a pure function word, below the lexical noun, a full content word.
The traditional NP-analysis is therefore unlike the analysis of clauses, which positions the functional categories as heads over the lexical categories. The point is illustrated by drawing a parallel to the analysis of auxiliary verbs. Given a combination such as will understand, one views the modal auxiliary verb will, a function word, as head over the main verb understand, a content word. Extending this type of analysis to a phrase like the car, the determiner the, a function word, should be head over car, a content word. In so doing, the NP the car becomes a DP; the point is illustrated with simple dependency-based hierarchies: Only the DP-analysis shown in c establishes the parallelism with the verb chain. It enables one to assume; this unity of the architecture of syntactic structure is the strongest argument in favor of the DP-analysis. The fact that determiners introduce the phrases in which they appear is viewed as support for the DP-analysis. One points to the fact that when more than one attributive adjective appear, their order is somewhat flexible, e.g. an old friendly dog vs. a friendly old dog.
The position of the determiner, in contrast, is fixed. The fact that the determiner's position at the left-most periphery of the phrase is set is taken as an indication that it is the head of the phrase; the reasoning assumes that the architecture of phrases is robust if the position of the head is fixed. The flexibility of order for attributive adjectives is taken as evidence that they are indeed dependents of the noun. Possessive -s constructions in English are produced as evidence in favor of the DP-analysis; the key trait of the possessive -s construction is that the -s can attach to the right periphery of a phrase. This fact means that -s is not a suffix. Further, the possessive -s construction has the same distributi
Grammatical relation
In linguistics, grammatical relations are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional grammar are subject, direct object, indirect object. In recent times, the syntactic functions, typified by the traditional categories of subject and object, have assumed an important role in linguistic theorizing, within a variety of approaches ranging from generative grammar to functional and cognitive theories. Many modern theories of grammar are to acknowledge numerous further types of grammatical relations; the role of grammatical relations in theories of grammar is greatest in dependency grammars, which tend to posit dozens of distinct grammatical relations. Every head-dependent dependency bears a grammatical function; the grammatical relations are exemplified in traditional grammar by the notions of subject, direct object, indirect object: Fred gave Susan the book. The subject Fred is the source of the action; the direct object the book is acted upon by the subject, the indirect object Susan receives the direct object or otherwise benefits from the action.
Traditional grammars begin with these rather vague notions of the grammatical functions. When one begins to examine the distinctions more it becomes clear that these basic definitions do not provide much more than a loose orientation point. What is indisputable about the grammatical relations is that they are relational; that is, subject and object can exist as such only by virtue of the context in which they appear. A noun such as Fred or a noun phrase such as the book cannot qualify as subject and direct object unless they appear in an environment, e.g. a clause, where they are related to each other and/or to an action or state. In this regard, the main verb in a clause is responsible for assigning grammatical relations to the clause "participants". Most grammarians and students of language intuitively know in most cases what the subject and object in a given clause are, but when one attempts to produce theoretically satisfying definitions of these notions, the results are less than clear and therefore controversial.
The contradictory impulses have resulted in a situation where most theories of grammar acknowledge the grammatical relations and rely on them for describing phenomena of grammar but at the same time, avoid providing concrete definitions of them. Various principles can be acknowledged that attempts to define the grammatical relations are based on; the thematic relations can provide semantic orientation for defining the grammatical relations. There is a tendency for subjects to be objects to be patients or themes. However, the thematic relations can not be vice versa; this point is evident with the active-passive diathesis and ergative verbs: Marge has fixed the coffee table. The coffee table has been fixed; the torpedo sank the ship. The ship sank. Marge is the agent in the first pair of sentences because she initiates and carries out the action of fixing, the coffee table is the patient in both because it is acted upon in both sentences. In contrast, the subject and direct object are not consistent across the two sentences.
The subject is the agent Marge in the first sentence and the patient The coffee table in the second sentence. The direct object is the patient the coffee table in the first sentence, there is no direct object in the second sentence; the situation is similar with the ergative verb sunk/sink in the second pair of sentences. The noun phrase the ship is the theme in both sentences, although it is the object in the first of the two and the subject in the second; the grammatical relations belong to the level of surface syntax, whereas the thematic relations reside on a deeper semantic level. If, the correspondences across these levels are acknowledged the thematic relations can be seen as providing prototypical thematic traits for defining the grammatical relations. Another prominent means used to define the syntactic relations is in terms of the syntactic configuration; the subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside of the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase.
This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are derived from the configuration. This "configurational" understanding of the grammatical relations is associated with Chomskyan phrase structure grammars; the configurational approach is limited in. It works best for the object arguments. For other clause participants, it is less insightful, since it is not clear how one might define these additional syntactic functions in terms of the configuration. Furthermore concerning the subject and object, it can run into difficulties, e.g. There were two lizards in the drawer; the configurational approach has difficulty with such cases. The plural verb were agrees with the post-verb noun phrase two lizards, which suggests that two lizards is the subject, but since two lizards follows the verb, one might view it as being located inside the verb phrase, which means it should count as the object. This second observation suggests. Many efforts to define the grammatical relation
Head (linguistics)
In linguistics, the head or nucleus of a phrase is the word that determines the syntactic category of that phrase. For example, the head of the noun phrase boiling hot water is the noun water. Analogously, the head of a compound is the stem that determines the semantic category of that compound. For example, the head of the compound noun handbag is bag; the other elements of the phrase or compound modify the head, are therefore the head's dependents. Headed phrases and compounds are called endocentric, whereas exocentric phrases and compounds lack a clear head. Heads are crucial to establishing the direction of branching. Head-initial phrases are right-branching, head-final phrases are left-branching, head-medial phrases combine left- and right-branching. Examine the following expressions: big red dog birdsongThe word dog is the head of big red dog since it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase, not an adjective phrase; because the adjectives big and red modify this head noun, they are its dependents.
In the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head since it determines the basic meaning of the compound. The stem bird is therefore dependent on song. Birdsong is a kind of song, not a kind of bird. Conversely, a songbird is a type of bird; the heads of phrases can be identified by way of constituency tests. For instance, substituting a single word in place of the phrase big red dog requires the substitute to be a noun, not an adjective. Many theories of syntax represent heads by means of tree structures; these trees tend to be organized in terms of one of two relations: either in terms of the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars or the dependency relation of dependency grammars. Both relations are illustrated with the following trees: The constituency relation is shown on the left and the dependency relation on the right; the a-trees identify heads by way of category labels, whereas the b-trees use the words themselves as the labels. The noun stories is the head over the adjective funny.
In the constituency trees on the left, the noun projects its category status up to the mother node, so that the entire phrase is identified as a noun phrase. In the dependency trees on the right, the noun projects only a single node, whereby this node dominates the one node that the adjective projects, a situation that identifies the entirety as an NP; the constituency trees are structurally the same as their dependency counterparts, the only difference being that a different convention is used for marking heads and dependents. The conventions illustrated with these trees are just a couple of the various tools that grammarians employ to identify heads and dependents. While other conventions abound, they are similar to the ones illustrated here; the four trees above show a head-final structure. The following trees illustrate head-final structures further as well as head-initial and head-medial structures; the constituency trees appear on the left, dependency trees on the right. Henceforth the convention is employed.
The next four trees are additional examples of head-final phrases: The following six trees illustrate head-initial phrases: And the following six trees are examples of head-medial phrases: The head-medial constituency trees here assume a more traditional n-ary branching analysis. Since some prominent phrase structure grammars take all branching to be binary, these head-medial a-trees may be controversial. Trees that are based on the X-bar schema acknowledge head-initial, head-final, head-medial phrases, although the depiction of heads is less direct; the standard X-bar schema for English is as follows: This structure is both head-initial and head-final, which makes it head-medial in a sense. It is head-initial insofar as the head X0 precedes its complement, but it is head-final insofar as the projection X' of the head follows its specifier; some language typologists classify language syntax according to a head directionality parameter in word order, that is, whether a phrase is head-initial or head-final, assuming that it has a fixed word order at all.
English is more head-initial than head-final, as illustrated with the following dependency tree of the first sentence of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis: The tree shows the extent to which English is a head-initial language. Structure is descending as processing move from left to right. Most dependencies have the head preceding its dependent, although there are head-final dependencies in the tree. For instance, the determiner-noun and adjective-noun dependencies are head-final as well as the subject-verb dependencies. Most other dependencies in English are, head-initial as the tree shows; the mixed nature of head-initial and head-final structures is common across languages. In fact purely head-initial or purely head-final languages do not exist, although there are some languages that approach purity in this respect, for instance Japanese; the following tree is of the same sentence from Kafka's story. The glossing conventions are those established by Lehmann. One can see the extent to which Japanese is head-final: A large majority of head-dependent orderings in Japanese are head-final.
This fact is obvious in this tree, since structure is ascending as speech and processing move from left to right. Thus the word order of Japanese is in a sense the opposite of English, it is common to classify language morphology according to whether a phrase is head-mark
Parse tree
A parse tree or parsing tree or derivation tree or concrete syntax tree is an ordered, rooted tree that represents the syntactic structure of a string according to some context-free grammar. The term parse tree itself is used in computational linguistics. Parse trees concretely reflect the syntax of the input language, making them distinct from the abstract syntax trees used in computer programming. Unlike Reed-Kellogg sentence diagrams used for teaching grammar, parse trees do not use distinct symbol shapes for different types of constituents. Parse trees are constructed based on either the constituency relation of constituency grammars or the dependency relation of dependency grammars. Parse trees may be generated for sentences in natural languages, as well as during processing of computer languages, such as programming languages. A related concept is that of phrase marker or P-marker, as used in transformational generative grammar. A phrase marker is a linguistic expression marked as to its phrase structure.
This may be presented as a bracketed expression. Phrase markers are generated by applying phrase structure rules, themselves are subject to further transformational rules. A set of possible parse trees for a syntactically ambiguous sentence is called a "parse forest." The constituency-based parse trees of constituency grammars distinguish between terminal and non-terminal nodes. The interior nodes are labeled by non-terminal categories of the grammar, while the leaf nodes are labeled by terminal categories; the image below represents a constituency-based parse tree. The following abbreviations are used in the tree: S for sentence, the top-level structure in this exampleNP for noun phrase; the first NP, a single noun "John", serves as the subject of the sentence. The second one is the object of the sentence. VP for verb phrase, which serves as the predicateV for verb. In this case, it's a transitive verb hit. D for determiner, in this instance the definite article "the"N for nounEach node in the tree is either a root node, a branch node, or a leaf node.
A root node is a node. Within a sentence, there is only one root node. A branch node is a mother node. A leaf node, however, is a terminal node. S is the root node, NP and VP are branch nodes, John, hit and ball are all leaf nodes; the leaves are the lexical tokens of the sentence. A mother node is one. In the example, S is a parent of both N and VP. A daughter node is one that has at least one node directly above it to which it is linked by a branch of a tree. From the example, hit is a daughter node of V; the terms parent and child are sometimes used for this relationship. The dependency-based parse trees of dependency grammars see all nodes as terminal, which means they do not acknowledge the distinction between terminal and non-terminal categories, they are simpler on average than constituency-based parse trees. The dependency-based parse tree for the example sentence above is as follows: This parse tree lacks the phrasal categories seen in the constituency-based counterpart above. Like the constituency-based tree, constituent structure is acknowledged.
Any complete sub-tree of the tree is a constituent. Thus this dependency-based parse tree acknowledges the subject noun John and the object noun phrase the ball as constituents just like the constituency-based parse tree does; the constituency vs. dependency distinction is far-reaching. Whether the additional syntactic structure associated with constituency-based parse trees is necessary or beneficial is a matter of debate. Phrase markers, or P-markers, were introduced in early transformational generative grammar, as developed by Noam Chomsky and others. A phrase marker representing the deep structure of a sentence is generated by applying phrase structure rules; this application may undergo further transformations. Phrase markers may be presented in the form of trees, but are given instead in the form of "bracketed expressions", which occupy less space in the memory. For example, a bracketed expression corresponding to the constituency-based tree given above may be something like: As with trees, the precise construction of such expressions and the amount of detail shown can depend on the theory being applied and on the points that the query author wishes to illustrate.
Syntax Tree Editor Linguistic Tree Constructor phpSyntaxTree – Online parse tree drawing site phpSyntaxTree – Online parse tree drawing site rSyntaxTree Enhanced version of phpSyntaxTree in Ruby with Unicode and Vectorized graphics Qtree – LaTeX package for draw
"Those five beautiful shiny Arkansas Black apples" is a noun phrase of which apples is the head. To test, a single pronoun can replace the whole noun phrase, as in "They look delicious".
