LIN102H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Cleft Sentence, Ambitransitive Verb, Phrase Structure Rules
Document Summary
Sequences of words in a sentence will become organized into strings of words that behave as grammatical units in the syntactic structures. Phrases are units of structure that are bigger than words but smaller than sentences. Phrases are made of different parts having different functions. A single phrase will form a constituent in a sentence. Each phrase will have a head that determines the grammatical category of the phrase and the way it behaves. To illustrate the grammatical structure of sentences and show how phrases interact with each other, linguists will often use a tree diagram. Tree diagrams label the individual phrases and the relation to others. When using tree diagrams, triangles can be used to indicate that there is a structure in the phrase that is not shown. When not using tree diagrams, [] can be used to indicate the boundaries between phrases. By developing a system for annotating the relation between phrases, linguists are able to.
