tions it tries to answer and through the shorthand notation it uses for sentence
analysis. We can begin examining both issues by considering that phrase-struc-
ture grammar recognizes that a sentence (S) has two primary components, a
noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP). The level of grammatical analysis,
therefore, proceeds on the basis of phrases. The first grammar “rule” in
phrase-structure analysis reflects this basic characteristic:
SÆNP VPThis expression is read as follows: “S is rewritten as NP VP.” This rule is
the starting point of all grammatical analyses in phrase-structure grammar.
Keep in mind that this statement is not a rule for generating sentences; it
simply describes the fact that English sentences that we can observe on a
daily basis follow this basic pattern. Notice that phrase-structure grammar
focuses on form, not function. In the stated rule, there is no reference to sub-
ject or predicate; instead, it is understood that the NP is the subject and that
the VP is the predicate.
Let’s examine how this rule can describe a sentence that we have seen before:
- Dogs bark.
As we’ve already noted,Dogsis a noun phrase, andbarkis a verb phrase.
Thus, we can use phrase-structure notation to describe the grammatical struc-
ture of the sentences as follows:
SÆNP VPThis rule describes the makeup of the sentence, but it is not sufficiently spe-
cific because it does not fully describe the noun phrase or the verb phrase. We
can look at the sentence and determine the composition of these phrases, which
in turn allows us to write additional rules for NP and VP. In this case, the NP is
composed of a single noun (N), and the VP is composed of a single verb (V):
NPÆNVPÆVTo complete the description, we need to assign words to N and V, which re-
sults in the following:
NÆdogsVÆbark102 CHAPTER 4