In syntax trees in English, can prepositional phrases, modifying either verbs or nouns, ever be sibling to the verb or noun itself for example and not a verb phrase/noun phrase?
I've heard the correct description of the constituents of a sentence like "The phone in Jack's pocket rang" is
(S (NP (NP (Det The) (N phone))
(PP (P in)
(NP (Det Jack's) (N pocket))))
(VP rang))
as corroborated by the parser https://www.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/submit-sentence-4.html that generated the skeleton of the above tree (I added the N, Det, P, leaf nodes).
As you can see, the subject noun phrase "The phone in Jack's pocket" consists of two constituents, a noun phrase "The phone" and a prepositional phrase "in Jack's pocket". This is despite what might be (in my opinion) another reasonable syntax tree, breaking the noun phrase "The phone in Jack's pocket" directly into a Det "The", an N "phone", and a PP "in Jack's pocket". Additionally "The phone" seems to fail the replacement test for a noun phrase: "It in Jack's pocket rang" doesn't sound grammatical to me anymore.
What's the correct hierarchy of NPs or VPs that contain PPs and why?