Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: StructureThe 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.
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:
(30) Kate claimed [Geoff jeopardised the expedition]
This partial bracketing demonstrates at a glance how the main sentence contains an
embedded one and so bracketing can be a very useful way of describing simple
structures.
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:
(31) [S [P the postwoman] [P pestered [P the doctor] [P on [P his birthday]]]]
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.
1.6 Labels
Although we have been labelling phrases with the symbol P, not all phrases are
equivalent to each other. This is best seen in terms of the distributions of phrases.
Take, for example the two phrases in (16) the postwoman and the doctor. These look
very similar, both consisting of a determiner followed by a noun. They also have the
same distribution patterns, as shown by the fact that wherever we can put one of them
we will also be able to put the other:
(32) a [the doctor] pestered [the postwoman]
b I saw [the doctor]/[the postwoman]
c they hid from [the doctor]/[the postwoman]
As these phrases have the same distributions, we can assume that they are phrases
of the same kind. However, not all phrases distribute in the same way. Consider the
phrase on his birthday. This cannot go in the same places as those in (32):
(33) a [on his birthday] pestered [the postwoman]
b I saw [on his birthday]
c *they hid from [on his birthday]
Clearly this phrase must be different from the previous two. We will see in the next
chapter that the identity of a phrase is determined by one of the words it contains. This
word is known as the head of the phrase. It will be argued later on in this book that the