Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: Structure(25) S
P P
the diagnosis S worried P
that she P the postwoman
had P
the flu
Of course, this sentence could contain phrases that contain sentences and there
could be other phrases elsewhere in the sentence that contain sentences. Hence very
complex structures can be produced, though we will not exemplify these here for
reasons of space.
1.4 Structural positions
The notion of structure helps us to define grammatical positions more easily. As we
saw previously grammatical positions cannot be defined in terms of linear order. The
verb, for example, might be the second, the third or indeed the nth element in a
sentence, and yet there is still a definite position for the verb which no other element
can occupy. Once we have introduced the notion of structure, however, we can see that
the verb occupies the same structural position no matter what else is present in the
clause.
Consider the following structures:
(26) S S S
P P P P P P
he snored the man snored the old man snored
Notice that in all these structures the verb occupies the same position inside the second
phrase of the sentence. It would not matter how many words or other phrases the first
phrase contained, the verb would still be in the same position with respect to its own
phrase, and hence grammatical position defined in terms of structure is much more
satisfactory than in terms of linear order. Moreover, if we consider the structure of the
phrase that the verb appears in, we can identify its position within this phrase more
easily than by counting its position in a linear string:
(27) P P P P
smiled kick P talk P surely saw P
the cat to P the light
the police