StructureAgain, we cannot identify the position of the verb within the phrase in terms of linear
order, but in terms of the structure it is clear that the verb always comes directly
underneath this phrase, precedes its phrasal complements and may follow adverbial
modifiers. As we proceed it will become even clearer that there is a unique structural
position that verbs and verbs alone can occupy.
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:
(28) P
regret P
his decision
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is another popular way of representing structure, which we have made some
use of above without comment. This is the use of brackets to represent constituents.
For example, the sentence we discussed above the postwoman pestered the doctor on
his birthday can be represented as follows:
(29) [[the postwoman] [pestered [the doctor] [on [his birthday]]]]