7.3 Syntactic trees and phrase structure grammar

Phrase structure grammar organizes words into hierarchical structures, forming phrases and sentences. It uses rules to represent how constituents combine, allowing for infinite complexity through recursion. This approach helps us understand how language is built.

Tree diagrams visually represent these structures, showing how words group into larger units. By analyzing sentences top-down or bottom-up, we can see how phrases fit together to create meaning. This visual approach clarifies language structure.

Principles of Phrase Structure Grammar

Principles of phrase structure grammar

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• Constituent structure organizes words hierarchically into phrases which combine to form larger phrases or sentences (The cat sat on the mat)
• Phrase structure rules formally represent constituent combinations written as A → B C (S → NP VP)
• Recursion embeds phrases within phrases of the same type allowing infinite sentence complexity (The cat that caught the mouse that ate the cheese...)
• Constituency tests like substitution, movement, and coordination identify phrase boundaries and structures (The big dog chased the small cat)

Hierarchical structure in syntactic trees

• Tree structure components include root node (S), internal nodes (NP, VP), terminal nodes (words), and connecting branches
• Top-down analysis breaks S into constituents until reaching individual words (S → NP VP → Det N V NP → The dog chased the cat)
• Bottom-up analysis groups words into phrases, building up to complete sentence (The + dog → NP, chased + the + cat → VP, NP + VP → S)

Labeling constituents in tree diagrams

• Phrase labels: NP, VP, PP, AP, AdvP represent larger syntactic units (The big dog)
• Word-level labels: N, V, Adj, Adv, Det, P categorize individual words (dog, run, happy, quickly, the, on)
• Functional labels: Subj, Obj, Comp describe grammatical roles within sentence structure (The dog [Subj] chased the cat [Obj])

Application of phrase structure rules

• Basic phrase structure rules: S → NP VP, NP → (Det) (Adj) N (PP), VP → V (NP) (PP), PP → P NP
• Lexical rules: N → dog, cat, book; V → run, eat, sleep; Adj → big, red, happy
• Generating sentences starts with S, applies rules recursively until all non-terminal symbols replaced (S → NP VP → Det N V NP → The dog chased the cat)

Visualization of sentence structure

• Structural ambiguity produces multiple tree structures for single sentence (I saw the man with the telescope)
• Attachment ambiguity shows different modifier attachment points through varied branching (The girl with the red hat)
• Coordination ambiguity displays multiple groupings of coordinated elements (old men and women)
• Ambiguity resolved through context, intonation, world knowledge (She hit the man with the umbrella)