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A sentence diagram is a pictorial representation of the grammatical structure of a sentence. The term "sentence diagram" is used more when teaching written language, where sentences are diagrammed. The model shows the relations between words and the nature of sentence structure and can be used as a tool to help recognize which potential ...
Before the emergence of the X-bar theory, thus in the period between Chomsky (1957) [4] and Jackendoff (1977), [5] syntactic structures were represented based on phrase structure rules (PSR). The man studies linguistics enthusiastically. This sentence involves the following five PSRs: S → NP VP; NP → Det N (the man) NP → N (linguistics)
Phrase structure rules break sentences down into their constituent parts. These constituents are often represented as tree structures (dendrograms). The tree for Chomsky's sentence can be rendered as follows: A constituent is any word or combination of words that is dominated by a single node. Thus each individual word is a constituent.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
The "X" in the X-bar theory is equivalent to a variable in mathematics: It can be substituted by syntactic categories such as N, V, A, and P.These categories are lexemes and not phrases: The "X-bar" is a grammatical unit larger than X, thus than a lexeme, and the X-double-bar (=XP) outsizes the X(-single)-bar.
In other words, the whole sentence is not categorized as a noun phrase or a verb phrase, but as a new unit—a sentence—which is an exocentric construction. The rule S → NP VP demonstrates how the combination of these parts creates a new structure that doesn’t directly reflect the properties of its individual components.
For example, the sentences "Pat loves Chris" and "Chris is loved by Pat" mean roughly the same thing and use similar words. Some linguists, Chomsky in particular, have tried to account for this similarity by positing that these two sentences are distinct surface forms that derive from a common (or very similar [ 1 ] ) deep structure.
What great students you have! (subject) What a nice thing you did. (object gap) How kind you are. (predicative complement gap) The following diagram shows the syntactic structure of the clause How kind you are. The clause has a fronted adjective phrase (Front: AdjP) how kind, which is co-indexed to the predicative complement gap (PredComp: gap ...