Questions tagged [constituents]
The constituents tag has no usage guidance.
23 questions
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A set of Constituency Tests
Is there any paper or resource where various constituency tests are listed and analyzed (besides topicalisation, clefting, pseudoclefting and all those tests that are illustrated on English)?
More ...
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How do I identify constituents and clause boundaries?
I'm going through some practice exercises for an upcoming exam and trying to do syntax trees is really tripping me up. Could anyone please walk me through how they would break them down and how to ...
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Is an OBL argument in complement or adjunct position?
My syntax lecture materials on Arguementhood vs Adjuncthood explain that one difference between arguments and adjuncts lies in the participation in alternations: only arguments participate in ...
- 175
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"come a long way" [V+OBJ/COMP/ADJUNCT]?
Can someone tell me
i) in terms of constituent tree structure, if a long way is a complement as opposed to an adjunct
ii) in terms of thematic roles, whether a long way takes on the role of location ...
- 175
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Constituency Tests
I had a test and the question was to test the underlined part for constituency; however, I got confused because I used the test of deletion, but I found the sentence ungrammatical, so my answer was ...
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Is there a language whose syntactic structure accepts a specifier of a PP?
We know a preposition (in X-bar theory) is the head of a prepositional phrase and it has a complement that is the sister of this very preposition. However I've never seen a language with a constituent ...
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Can adjuncts modify nouns?
The Wikipedia page on adjuncts gives the example
Yesterday, Lorna saw the dog in the garden.
Notice that this example is ambiguous between whether the adjunct in the garden modifies the
verb saw (in ...
user31190
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Why treat 'verbal group', not 'verb phrase', as a constituent of a clause in Systemic Functional Grammar?
SFC (Halliday, etc.) doesn't treat as a constituent of a clause a verb phrase (VP), which combines with an noun phrase (NP) to form a clause in a canonical English construction. Instead, SFC uses the ...
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Are individual words really constituents?
The constituent unit is defined in Wikipedia as a word or a group of words that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. When phrase structure trees are produced, each node in the ...
- 5,805
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What is the difference in a constituent and a phrase?
From Wikipedia:
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words
that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.
A phrase is a sequence of one or more ...
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SV Constituent Structure (Syntax)
so here's the set-up: In a sentence like "Bill went to the store," several accepted constituency tests can produce "Bill went" as a constituent. These tests include the question test (What happened? ...
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Is this noun phrase a constituent of the given sentence?
For the sentence, 'I saw the new play by Smith last week' is the noun phrase consisting only of a proper noun 'Smith' a constituent of the sentence?
Instinctively I think that it is not a constituent,...
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Constituent borders
Let us imagine there to exist, for instance, a DP. We always observe the only head D on the left or the right of the phrase (depending upon the direction of branching). But every constituent naturally ...
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Bracket notation for discontinuous trees
Formally representing constituency based structures, using brackets to denote constituents, is straight-forward - until discontinuities are thrown in the mix.
Consider this example, adapted from this ...
- 507
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In 'Kim is tall', is 'is tall' a VP?
Do we say that in
Kim is tall.,
the is tall is a constituent?
Well, the standard answer is clearly Yes (see below). My questions are:
What is the linguistic evidence for the assertion that is ...
- 497
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What is "always" constituent of?
In the following sentence:
People's opinions are not always the result of their experiences.
What is "always" constituent of?
I tried movement:
Not always, people's opinions are the result of ...
- 149
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CGEL's argument on the constituent structure of certain sentences that involve 'as well as'
In CGEL on pp. 1316-1317, we find a discussion of two different uses of as well as:
[70] i b. [Abstraction] [as well as impressionism] were Russian
inventions. &...
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Drawing a phrasal constituent tree for a specific sentence
I'm trying to do some language analysis on the opening paragraph of The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, specifically looking at phrasal constituents. The first sentence is as follows:
"I became what ...
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How to determine an immediate constituent of a sentence [closed]
I am studying Spanish and Portuguese at university, and I am having some trouble with part of a Spanish linguistics assignment. I would be very grateful if somebody could shed some light on how to ...
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Identifying core arguments, constituents? [closed]
In the sentence, 'It was raining' what are the core arguments?
I think [It] is a core argument and [was raining] is another. This would mean that it is a NP and was raining is a VP. But if this is ...
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Is the determination of the constituents within a sentence without exception nonambiguous?
Is there always one unique way to partition a sentence into its constituents or, like in the following picture, is it possible to analyze a sentence into parts several different ways?
The three rows ...
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Is there a paradigmatic formalism for dependency grammars?
When looking on the web, wikipedia for example, at the concept of
constituent, it is associated with the concept of phrase structure,
and rather quickly with context-free languages (as the ...
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What empirical evidence can be produced that all syntactic structure is binary branching?
A tenet of the Minimalist Program is that all syntactic structure is binary branching. Merge always merges two constituents to a greater constituent until the greatest constituent, the sentence, is ...
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