LING2001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Ditransitive Verb, Preposition And Postposition
Thursday, 30 March 2017
LECTURE 10
STRUCTURE OF TREES
-The model
•Syntactic trees are models of constituent structure and relations between constituents
•In order to be able to go further in our analysis of grammar, we will need to understand
additional aspects of the model itself
-What various positions in a tree hierarchy can tell us about relations between
constituents that are fundamental to the grammar
-Terminology: node types
•Root node: dominates everything, is dominated by nothing; each node has a label
•Non-terminal nodes: dominates something (is a mother)
•Terminal nodes: dominates nothing (is not a mother)
-Domination (exhaustive)
•If a node contains another, then it dominates it
•A constituent is a set of terminal nodes exhaustively dominated by a particular node
!1
Non-terminal nodes
Terminal nodes
Root node
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Thursday, 30 March 2017
•NP2 here dominates exhaustively the set of terminal nodes D, N2, P1, D and N3 as they
are all dominated by NP2 and there is no terminal node in this set that is not dominated by
NP2
-Domination (immediate)
•A node immediately dominates another if there is no intervening node between them
-Precedence (sister)
•Both T and NP1 are to the left of VP, and are all dominated by the same node, TP
•D sister precedes AdjP and N1, but Adj does not sister precede N1
•N1 does not sister precede T
•VP does not precede NP4, but dominates it
-Precedence (general)
!2
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Document Summary
The model: syntactic trees are models of constituent structure and relations between constituents, in order to be able to go further in our analysis of grammar, we will need to understand additional aspects of the model itself. What various positions in a tree hierarchy can tell us about relations between constituents that are fundamental to the grammar. Terminology: node types: root node: dominates everything, is dominated by nothing; each node has a label, non-terminal nodes: dominates something (is a mother, terminal nodes: dominates nothing (is not a mother) Domination (exhaustive: if a node contains another, then it dominates it, a constituent is a set of terminal nodes exhaustively dominated by a particular node. !1: np2 here dominates exhaustively the set of terminal nodes d, n2, p1, d and n3 as they are all dominated by np2 and there is no terminal node in this set that is not dominated by.
