SENTENCE
STRUCTURE
I really do not know anything has even
more exciting than diagramming
sentences.
-Gertrude Stein

DET N V DET N
This template says that a determiner (an
article) is followed by a noun, which is followed
by a verb, and so on. It would describe English
sentences such as the following.
 The child found a puppy.
 The professor wrote a book.
 The runner won a race.

The child found a puppy.
The words in the sentence may be
grouped into [the child] and [found a puppy],
corresponding to subject and predicate of the
sentence.
Further division [the child], [found], [a
puppy], finally for the individual words. [[the]
[child]] [[found] [[a] [puppy]]].

root
child found
the a puppy

The tree conveys the same
information as nested square brackets.The
hierarchical organization of the tree reflects
the groupings and subgroupings of the
words of the sentence.
The phrase found a puppy
divides naturally into two branches, one for
the verb found and other for the direct
object a puppy.

CONSTITUENTS
and
CONSTITUENCY
TESTS

CONSTITUENTS- natural groupings or parts of
the sentences.
3 TESTS
1. “STAND ALONE TEST’’- If a group of
words can stand alone, they form a
constituent.
-the set of words that can be used to
answer a question is a constituent.
EX: Q: What did you find?, the speaker might
answer a puppy, but not found a. A puppy can
stand alone, while found a cannot.

2. “REPLACEMENT BY A PRONOUN”-
pronouns can substitute for a natural group.
EX: Q: Where did you find a puppy?, the
speaker might answer, “ I found him in the
park.
3. “MOVE AS UNIT TEST”- if a group of words
can moved, they form a constituents.

EX: if we compare the ffg. sentences to the
sentence “The child found a puppy”, we see
the certain elements have moved.
• It was the puppy that the child found.
• A puppy was found by the child.
 Some sentences have prepositional
phrase in the predicate. Ex: The puppy
played in the garden.

Syntactic categories- It is the family of
expressions that can substitute for one
another without the loss of grammaticality.
- The child, the police, John, and so on
belongs to the syntactic category of NOUN
PHRASE (NP)- it may function as subject,
or as an object in a sentence.
- The girl that the professor Snape loved
married the man of her dreams.

Other Syntactic Categories
VERB PHRASE (VP)- always contains a verb,
ex. found a puppy
-VP may contain other categories such as
PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE (PP), which is a
preposition followed by an NP, such as in the
park, on a roof, with a balloon.

LEXICAL AND FUNCTIONAL CATEGORIES
Syntactic categories includes both
phrasal categories such as NP,VP, AdjP, PP,
AdvP.
Lexical categories such as noun (N),
verb (V), preposition (P), adjective (Adj),
adverb (Adv).

LEXICAL
CATEGORIES
EXAMPLES
noun Puppy, boy, soup, happiness, fork, kiss, pillow, cake
verb Find, run, sleep, throw, realize, see, try
preposition Up, down, across, into, by, with
adjective Red, big, candid, hopeless, fair, idotic
adverb Again, carefully, luckily, never, very, fairly

Phrase structure tree/ constituent structure
tree- it is the tree diagram with with syntactic
category information. It shows that a
sentence is both linear string of words and
hierarchical structure with phrases nested in
phrases.
PS tree represents 2 aspects:
1. Linear order of words in a sentence
2. identification of syntactic categories of
words and group of woords.

3.The hierarchical structure of the
syntactic categories..
The following diagrams provides
labels for each constituents of sentece
“The child found a puppy”. It will show
that the entire sentence belongs to
syntactic category of S ( S-node
encompasses all the words)

PS Tree- it is a formal device for
representing the speaker’s knowledge
of the structure of knowledge in his
language .
The information represented in the
PS tree, can also be presented by other
formal device, the PS rules. PS rules can
capture the knowledge that the
speakers have about the possible
structure of knowledge

PS RULES
1. S NP VP
2. NP Det N
3. VP V NP
4. VP V
-Rule 1 says that a sentence (S) contain NP
and VP in that order.
S
NP VP

Rule 2- one subtree for English NP
looks like this:
NP
Det N
Rule 3- says that a verb phrase
consists of a verb followed by an NP.
VP
V NP

The child found a puppy.
S
NP VP
Det N V NP
The child found Det N
a puppy

5. VP V PP
6. PP P NP
The following sentences contain
prepositional phrases following the verb.
• The puppy played in the garden
• The boat sailed up the river.
• A girl laughed at the monkey.

S
NP VP
Det N V PP
The puppy played P NP
in Det N
the garden

7. VP V , CP
8. CP C , S
Another option open to VP is to contain
or embed a sentence.
EX: The professor said that the student
passed the exam.
It contains a sentence “the student
passed the exam”. Preceding the embedded
sentence is the word “that”, which is a
complementizer.

CP- it stands for complementizer
phrase.
Rule 8, says that CP contains
a complementizer such as “that”
followed by embedded sentence.
Other complementizers are if and
whether.

S
NP VP
Det N V CP
The professor said C S
that NP VP
Det N V NP
the students passed Det N
the exam.

Here are the PS rules we have discussed
so far. A few other rule will be considered later.
1. S NP , VP
2. NP Det , N
3. VP V , NP
4. VP V
5. VP V , PP
6. PP P , NP
7. VP V , CP
8. CP C , S