Phrase Structure

Kyle Johnson
Syntax is the study of the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences. It
attempts to describe at least two aspects of this phenomena. First, it describes
which arrangements of words are grammatical, i.e. the well-formed ones. So it
is concerned with characterizing the contrast below:
() a. e woman le town.
b. * e le woman town.
(We use the convention of placing a * before strings of words that are not
grammatical.) And second, it describes the relationship between the meaning
that some particular group of words has and the arrangement of those words.
So, for example, the actions carried out by Mary and Mark in the following are
dierent, and this dierence corresponds to the dierent position that these
two words occupy in the sentence.
() a. Mary kissed Mark.
b. Mark kissed Mary.
Lets begin with the rst of these goals of syntax, the grammatical arrange-
ments of words. At the bare minimum, we can observe that the linear order
of words in English is important; we must nd a means for describing which
ordering of words is well-formed and which not. e simplest means of do-
ing this is not available, i.e. we cannot merely list all the possible orderings
of words. at is, we do not have stored in our heads a long list of possible
sentences. e reason for this is simple: when we learn a new word, we know
where that word may be positioned with respect to other words. For example,
let me teach you a new word: stram. is is the name we shall give to a hair
that grows out of ones ear. Now that you know that word, you also know that
the sentences below have the grammaticality values shown.
() a. at stram seems too short.
b. * Stram that short too seems.
is fact shows that we cannot encode our knowledge of arrangements of
words in terms of those words themselves. Instead we may make reference
to the categories (or parts of speech) that those words belong to. is will
correctly account for the fact that once we know that a word is a noun, we
know automatically where it may fall in a sentence.
Perhaps, then, we store in our heads all the grammatical arrangements of
categories. is too cannot be correct; but for a more subtle reason. As the
following examples illustrate, sentences may be of indenite length.
2 Kyle Johnson
() a. Mary likes Mark.
b. John said that Mary likes Mark.
c. Sally believes that John said that Mary likes Mary.
d. Sandy thought Sally believes that John said that Mary likes
Mary.
Now its clear that a sentence of English cannot be innitely long. But we need
to determine whether this is a fact about our knowledge of the arrangement of
words. at is, we need to gure out whether our knowledge of syntax allows
innitely long sentences or not. If our knowledge of syntax does not allow
innitely long sentences, then our model of this knowledge the grammar
we write will have to reect this fact. But this means in essence that we
are going to have to decide at which point to terminate the expansion begun
above. is termination point would have to be arbitrarily chosen, and this
points to the inadequacy of supposing that our knowledge of syntax does
not encompass innite strings of words. In fact, the common conclusion
from these observations is that the failure of our ability to utter innitely long
strings does not reect some fact about our knowledge of syntax, but rather
some aspect of our abilities in general. In particular, our life-span, or perhaps
our limited memories or our good common sense, prevent us from uttering
such things. Our knowledge of syntax does not. is distinction is described
by saying that our linguistic competence is separate from our linguistic
performance.
But if our knowledge of which strings are grammatical and which arent
includes knowledge about innitely long strings, then we cannot possibly have
such a list in our heads. Our brains are of nite size and therefore cannot hold
things of innite length. Hence we must nd another means for representing
our knowledge of the well-formed strings of words. A list is wrong. ere
must be some other way in which we recognize a string of words as a gram-
matical arrangement. ere must be some way this knowledge is encoded
in our minds that is nite, but still allows us to make a judgement about an
innite number of possible strings.
We are going to set aside the solution to this problem for awhile, and
discuss some other aspects of our knowledge of syntax. We shall encounter
other problems whose solution will solve the problem just discussed.
Consider the relationship between the following two sentences.
() a. Mary has le.
b. Has Mary le?
We know that these sentences are related in the following sense: they both
mean the same thing, save that one is a question, the other a statement. More
particularly, (a) is uttered when the situation described by Mary has le is
something the speaker wishes to assert. One would use this sentence, for
instance, to convey the belief that the situation (a) describes holds. We call
Phrase Structure 3
such sentences declaratives. By contrast, (b) is uttered when the speaker
wishes to determine whether the situation described by Mary has le actually
obtains. We call sentences of this sort Yes/No Questions. e important
point is that the situation both of these sentences describe is precisely the
same. e only dierence is whether the speaker is asserting that the situation
holds or seeking conrmation of it. is element of meaning is indicated by
word-order. is is the fact that we need to capture. We need to fashion a
theory that causes the words of these sentences to combine to describe the
same situation, and correlate the dierence in their word order with whether
or not the sentence is a question or a declarative. is points back to the
second goal of syntax: to account for the relation between the arrangements
of words and their meanings. What we need to do in the case at hand is nd
a way of relating the word order dierences in () to the dierence in their
meaning.
e standard way of describing the relation between these sentences is to
suppose that one is derived by a rule from the other. at is, one sentence
is transformed into the other. In particular, we suppose that the question is
made of the statement plus the application of some transformation that
moves around the constituents of the sentence to form the Verb-Subject word
order. We dont know yet how to characterize our knowledge that Mary has
le means what it means and is a grammatical string of words (thats what we
le unnished above), but let us suppose for this discussion that this aspect of
our knowledge is given. So we begin with Mary has le, and now concentrate
on the rule that yields Has Mary le?.
It appears on the face of it that this rule interchanges the rst two words.
But this is not what the rule does, as the following pair of sentences indicates.
() a. e woman has le.
b. * Woman the has le?
Perhaps what we should say, then, is that the rst verb is moved to the front of
the sentence. is is wrong as well, however, for two reasons. One of the rea-
sons is sort of irrelevant for the present discussion; it has to do with sentences
like:
() a. Mary le.
b. * Le Mary?
What this example shows is that the rule will have to be constrained so that it
moves only a certain class of verbs, and not so-called main verbs, verbs like
le. e class of verbs that the rule moves is called auxiliary verbs (or, AUX).
ese verbs are: be, have, do and the modals: can, must, will, should, shall,
could, would, etc. So the rule will have to be constrained so that it only moves
Auxiliary verbs. English doesnt have a way of forming Yes/No questions from
sentences that dont have Auxiliary verbs.
4 Kyle Johnson
e formulation of the rule cannot, as we suggested earlier, be simply:
Move the rst auxiliary verb to the front of the sentence because of examples
like the following.
() a. e woman that has kissed Bill might leave.
b. * Has the woman that kissed Bill might leave?
What we want is for the rule to produce () from (a) instead.
() Might the woman that has kissed Bill leave?
What this example illustrates is that the notion rst auxiliary is not what
the rule makes reference to. e only way to get the rule to manipulate the
right verb is to make reference to the collection of words that make up the
subject. So our grammar must be able to make reference to groups of words.
ese groups are called phrases; and the subject of some sentence is the rst
Noun Phrase, a phrase that has a word of the category noun, in that sentence.
We can now express the rule as follows.
() Sv,ic1 AUX Ivivsio
Move the auxiliary verb that immediately follows the rst NP to the
front of the sentence.
Now that weve established that phrases exist, we can rephrase our rst task
in the following way: what are the correct arrangements of words that make
up some phrase. We can say that a Noun Phrase (NP) is made up of an initial
determiner, then an adjective, then a noun, as in:
() the brown fox
We write a Phrase-Structure rule to describe this possibility, as follows:
() NP Det Adj N
Note that though the noun is an obligatory part of a noun phrase, neither
a determiner nor an adjective are. us, the following are possible noun
phrases.
() a. brown foxes
b. foxes
To represent the optionality of the determiner and adjective, well place these
terms in parentheses; as in:
() NP (Det) (Adj) N
When more examples are considered, the rule that describes all possible
arrangements of categories that make up a noun phrase looks something like:
() NP (Det) (Adj) N (PP) (CP)
Phrase Structure 5
Det stands for determiner, a category that includes the, a, some, many,
every, most and a few others. Adj stands for adjective, a category that
includes blue, bad, happy, friendly and scores of others. We will come back to
what these additional symbols represent.

And I should also warn you that the actual
rules allow for tremendously more complex
NPs than this simple start would lead one to
expect.
A sentence is made up of some NP followed by a collection of words that
begins with a verb. is collection of words forms a phrase called a Verb
Phrase, or VP, and is given by the following rules.
() VP V (NP) (PP) (CP)
VP AUX VP
Some examples are:
() a. eats
b. eats the beans
c. has eaten beans
And sentences themselves can have one of the two structures given below.
() S NP VP
S CP VP
All the sentences we have seen up to now have the shape that the rst of these
rules describes: they are all sentences that start with a noun phrase and end
with a verb phrase. But it is possible to have sentences that start with other
sentences, this is what the CP is, as we shall see in a moment. An example of
this kind is ().
() [
CP
at Mary hogs chocolate] bothers me.
e that Mary hogs chocolate part of this sentence is a CP.
Sometimes two rules of the sort in (), which are identical up to one term,
are abbreviated as follows:
() S
NP
CP
VP
e curly brackets (i.e., { and }) should be understood as enclosing a list
of options, exactly one of which must be chosen. us, () says that an S is
made up of either an NP or a CP at the beginning, followed by a VP.
e PP in these rules represents a group of words that contains a preposi-
tion, and forms a prepositional phrase. e following describes the shape that
these phrases take.
() PP P
NP
S

Some examples are:
() a. on the table b. for the woman
c. before the dance d. before John ran
e. because Sally eats beans f. behind the table
6 Kyle Johnson
We need one last phrase structure rule to be able to interpret all the
phrases named by our present rules. is is the rule that yields CP, or Com-
plementizer Phrase, as we shall call it. A CP is sort of like an S, except that it
always has a subordinating particle or complementizer word at the begin-
ning. So, for instance, in the following example, the group of words: that Peter
le is just a sentence with the word that, a complementizer, at the beginning.
() Mary said that Peter le.
We have the following phrase structure rule, then:
() CP C S
in which C stands for Complementizer. (Other complementizers are
whether and if.)
e phrases that words are arranged into, and that form sentences, can
be represented graphically with what are called Phrase-Marker Trees. An
example of a Phrase Marker Tree is ().
() S
NP
D
the
A
happy
N
child
VP
Aux
has
VP
V
eaten
NP
D
an
N
apple
We are now able to solve the problem posed by the existence of innitely
long sentences. Because the rules we have written so far are recursive, they
are able to generate innitely long, and innitely many, strings. e example
of innite length that we stumbled upon in () would be given the phrase
marker tree representation in () with these rules.
Phrase Structure 7
() S
NP
N
Sandy
VP
V
thought
CP
C
that
S
NP
N
Sally
VP
V
believes
CP
C
that
S
NP
N
John
VP
said . . .
ere is another context in which the innity of English sentences can be
seen, but this context calls for a change to the Phrase Structure rules we have
so far developed. It is possible for English verb phrases to have an indenite
number of prepositional phrases in them, as in:
() Mary walked [
PP
down the street] [
PP
over the hill] [
PP
through the woods] . . . .
Presently, however, our rule for VPs allows only one PP. One way of using
recursivity to capture these cases is to have two rules for VPs one that
introduces PPs (recursively), and the others to build VPs of the sorts that we
have already seen. We might adopt something like (), for instance.
() VP VP PP
VP V (NP) (CP)
VP AUX VP
is will give () the phrase marker tree, or parse, in ().
8 Kyle Johnson
() S
NP
N
Mary
VP
PP
P
down
NP
D
the
NP
N
street
VP
PP
P
over
NP
D
the
NP
N
hill
VP
PP
P
through
NP
D
the
NP
N
woods
VP
V
walked
Although the rules in () correctly allow for an indenite number of
Prepositional Phrases within a VPs, they arent quite right yet. ey have the
eect of putting PPs just at the right edge of a VP, and forcing all the other
phrases that a VP contains to come to their le. us, for instance, they allow
a Noun Phrase and a Prepositional Phrase to t inside a VP as in (), and not
as in ().
() S
NP
N
Sam
VP
PP
P
at
NP
N
noon
VP
V
met
NP
N
Sally
Phrase Structure 9
() S
NP
N
Sam
VP
NP
N
Sally
VP
V
met
PP
P
at
NP
N
noon
is is the correct outcome, as it turns out, since () is ungrammatical. But

At least its usually judged ungrammatical
by English speakers if the sentence is uttered
with normal intonation.
the rules in () say the same thing about PPs and CPs, and this is incorrect.
Sentences such as () are perfectly grammatical.
() I suggested [
PP
to Sam] [
CP
that he buy chocolate].
We need to change () therefore so that it allows CPs to follow PPs.
It also turns out that there can be an indenite number of CPs inside VPs,
just as there can be an indenite number of PPs. us, for instance, we nd
sentences such as:
() Mary will dance [
CP
when Radiohead comes on] [
CP
if you ask her nicely] [
CP
which might be disturbing]. . .
To describe both these facts, we can change the rules we have in () so that
they also introduce CPs recursively, as in ().
() VP VP PP
VP VP CP
VP V (NP)
VP AUX VP
is will now give () the phrase marker representation in ().
10 Kyle Johnson
() S
NP
N
I
VP
CP
C
that
S
NP
N
he
VP
V
buy
NP
N
chocolate
VP
PP
P
to
NP
N
Sam
VP
V
suggested
So now we correctly allow either PPs or CPs to be the last phrase in a VP, but
force NPs to precede a PP and/or a CP that they share a VP with. With these
changes to the rules that characterize VPs, we are now able to describe the
various ways in which VPs can be indenitely long. Although there are still
kinds of VPs that these rules do not describe, they describe enough of them
for the purposes of this class. ese will therefore be the rules for VPs that we
will use.
But some of our other rules will need to be further amended. We will want
to make changes to the rule that characterizes NPs, because they also seem
capable of having an indenite number of PPs and CPs within them, as, for
example, in:
() a. a ball [
PP
on the table] [
PP
behind the picture] [
PP
near the stapler] . . .
b. a ball [
CP
that you bought] [
CP
that Sally now has] [
CP
that might go to Bill] . . .
Here too we might consider using additional NP rules, one that recursively
introduces PPs, one that recursively introduces CP, and another parallel to the
one we fashioned earlier.
() NP NP PP
NP NP CP
NP (Det) (Adj) N
e NP in (a), for example, would consequently have the structure in ().
Phrase Structure 11
() NP
NP
PP
P
behind
NP
D
the
NP
N
picture
NP
NP
D
a
N
ball
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
table
PP
P
near
NP
D
the
NP
N
stapler
But there is additional complexity to NPs that we do not see in VPs. is
extra complexity arises because of the fact that adjectives too are capable of
coming an indenite number of times within NPs:
() the big, unhappy, hairy, unattractive, . . . dog
We will want to characterize this fact, like we have with PPs and CPs, by way
of a recursive rule. But, unlike the PP and CP situations, we cant rely on a rule
like () because that will wrongly produce NPs like ().
() NP Adj NP
() NP
A
unhappy
NP
D
the
N
dog
What we need, here, is a phrase inside NPs that recursively introduces ad-
jectives. is phrase is called an N bar, represented as N. We can use it to
introduce PPs and CPs too and, in fact, we will later encounter facts which
suggest that this is correct. So, our rules building NPs will now look like this:
() NP (D) N
N A N
N N PP
N N CP
N N
is will give to a noun phrase like () a phrase marker representation like
that in ().
12 Kyle Johnson
() NP
D
the
N
A
big
N
A
unhappy
N
A
hairy
N
N
dog
And it will no longer give the NP in (a) the representation in (). Instead it
will give it the structure in ().
() NP
D
a
N
PP
P
near
NP
D
the
N
N
stapler
N
PP
P
behind
NP
D
the
N
N
picture
N
N
N
ball
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
ere is another change we will need to make to our rules for NPs. is
change is made necessary by the existence of the boldfaced noun phrases
in ().
() a. Marys book has appeared.
b. e womans book has appeared.
c. e man from Spains book has appeared.
In these cases, there is another noun phrase found before a noun. is noun
phrase has an s appended to the end of it, and is said to be in the posses-
sion relation to the noun. So, for example, in (a), Mary is understood to
possess the book; and similarly for the woman and the man from Spain in the
(b) and (c). ese noun phrases have the structures indicated in ().
Phrase Structure 13
() a. NP
NPs
N
N
Mary
N
N
book
b. NP
NPs
D
the
N
N
woman
N
N
N
book
c. NP
NPs
D
the
N
N
N
man
PP
P
from
NP
N
N
Spain
N
N
book
Notice, incidentally, that the determiner, the, in the b and c examples, is part
of the possessive noun phrase, and not part of the NP that contains it. at is,
(b) isnt parsed as:
() NP
NPs
N
N
woman
D
the
N
N
book
In fact, it appears that a noun phrase in English can start with a determiner, or
it can start with a possessive NP, but it cant start with both. We can discover
this by rst observing that certain kinds of noun phrases are prevented from
starting with a determiner. NPs that have just a name in them, for instance,
do not easily start with a determiner. is is indicated by the dierence in the
examples of ().
() a. the woman
b. * the Mary
Presumably this has something to do with the incompatible meanings of
names and determiners. Whatever the cause, we can now see from the con-
trast in () that the determiner the must be within the possessive NP and not
the larger one.
() a. the book
b. * the Marys book
14 Kyle Johnson
e goodness of (a) shows that the can combine with book. erefore,
the badness of (b) must be because the in this example is prevented from
combining with book, and forced instead to be part of the possessive NP
containing Mary, which (b) has shown us isnt good.
ese observations require that we change our NP rules so that they allow
Noun Phrases to start with a possessive NP, but only when that NP doesnt
start with a determiner. is can be done by changing () to ().
() NP (D) N
NP (NPs) N
N A N
N N PP
N N CP
N N
ese rules now allow an NP to start with either a determiner or a possessive
NP (both optionally).
ere is one last kind of sentence structure that we will consider and in-
corporate into our set of Phrase Structure rules: coordination. Coordination
arises in cases, like (), where the word or, and, or but brings together two
strings of words (here in italics).
() a. e man visited the woman or the child.
b. e woman ran over the hill and through the woods.
c. e child crawled home and ate chocolate.
One fact about this construction is that the coordinator, as we shall call
the words or, and, and but, only brings together strings of words that t our
Phrase Structure rules. In the examples in (), the strings of words make up
an NP, in (a), a PP in (b) and a VP in (c). If we try to join strings that
dont t the rules which build phrases of these sorts, the result is ungrammati-
cal, as in ().
() a. * e man visited the or woman the child.
b. * e woman ran over and the hill through the woods.
c. * e child crawled home and child ate chocolate.
Further, the strings of words that are found on either side of the coordinator
must be the same kind of phrase. If the phrase to the right of and, for exam-
ple, is a PP, then so must the phrase that shows up to the le of and. If the
phrases on either side of the coordinator are not of the same kind, the result is
ungrammatical, as in ().
() a. * e man gave the book and to the woman.
b. * e happy and child le town.
We can describe these facts with the following pseudo-phrase structure rule.
Phrase Structure 15
() coordinator .
Where ranges over any category label (like Noun, Verb, etc.) or phrase (like
NP, VP, etc.). is rule will now give (a) the phrase marker representation in
(a), and (c) the representation in (b).
() a. S
NP
D
the
N
N
man
VP
V
visited
NP
NP
D
the
N
N
woman
or NP
D
the
N
N
child
b. S
NP
D
the
N
N
child
VP
and VP
V
ate
NP
N
N
chocolate
VP
V
crawled
NP
N
N
home
is method of describing which arrangements of words (or more prop-
erly, categories) make grammatical English sentences has an interesting con-
sequence. ey specify how words are arranged linearly in terms of the way in
which they are grouped into phrases. So, for instance, they say that sentences
will be constructed in such a way that the string of words that starts the sen-
tence can be grouped into a noun phrase and all of those words will precede
the words that make up a verb phrase that ends the sentence. To be part of
the noun phrase that starts a sentence a word must precede every word that is
part of the verb phrase that ends that sentence. In a sense, the phrase structure
rules can be thought of as a function from the grouping of words into phrases
into their linear order. In certain cases, the phrase structure rules can group
words in dierent ways, but yield the same linear ordering of those words. We
say in these cases that the string of words is structurally ambiguous.
16 Kyle Johnson
To get a handle on cases of this sort, lets begin by observing that the fol-
lowing string of words has more than one meaning. We say that it is semanti-
cally ambiguous.
() e boy hit the elf on the table.
is sentence can report that the elf on the table was hit by the boy, or it
can report that the hitting of the elf by the boy took place on the table. Now,
interestingly, this is one of those strings of words that can be given more than
one groupings into phrases by our phrase structure rules it is structurally
ambiguous. Either the PP on the table can be parsed as part of the NP or not
as part of the NP. It has the two representations given below.
() a. S
NP
D
the
N
N
boy
VP
V
hit
NP
D
the
N
N
N
elf
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
b. S
NP
D
the
N
N
boy
VP
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
VP
V
hit
NP
D
the
N
N
elf
Is there a connection between this structural ambiguity and the meanings
that this sentence carries? I wish to convince you that there is a connection
and that the relationship between the various syntactic representations that
this sentence has and its meanings is given by the following rule.
Phrase Structure 17
() Mouiiic.1io RUii
A PP modies the phrase that it is a sister to.
and are sis1ivs if they are both dominated by exactly the same
nodes in a phrase marker tree.
is rule is a step towards completing the second goal of syntax that I outlined
earlier: it describes one of the relations between the arrangements of words
and the meanings they convey. It assigns to (a) the rst interpretation de-
scribed above, the one in which it is the elf on the table which gets hit. And it
assigns to (b) the other interpretation, the one in which the hitting of the elf
happens on the table.
One reason for believing that there is a relationship between the structural
ambiguity of the string above and its semantic ambiguity is because this
hypothesis correctly predicts the number of meanings associated with strings
of this sort. To see this, consider the following example.
() I smashed the elf on the table with a hat.
is sentence has ve dierent meanings, depending on which phrase the PPs
on the table and with a hat modify. We might expect more than this number
of meanings as there are two PPs and three things that can be modied here:
VP, the rst NP and the second NP. But only ve emerge. is is predicted by
() since it makes the meanings that are available in cases like these depen-
dent on the syntactic representations that our phrase structure rules allow. In
(), our rules permit only ve dierent parses. ey are:
() S
NP
N
N
I
VP
PP
P
with
NP
D
a
N
N
hat
VP
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
VP
V
smashed
NP
D
the
N
N
elf
on the table and with a hat both modify smashed the elf :
Its on the table and with a hat that I smashed the elf.
18 Kyle Johnson
() S
NP
N
N
I
VP
PP
P
with
NP
D
a
N
N
hat
VP
V
smashed
NP
D
an
N
N
N
elf
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
on the table modies elf and with a hat modies smashed the elf :
Its with a hat that I smashed the elf that was on the table.
() S
NP
N
N
I
VP
V
smashed
NP
D
an
N
PP
P
with
NP
D
a
N
N
hat
N
N
N
elf
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
on the table and with a hat both modify elf :
I smashed the elf that was on the table and had a hat.
Phrase Structure 19
() S
NP
N
N
I
VP
V
smashed
NP
D
an
N
N
N
elf
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
table
PP
P
with
NP
D
a
N
N
hat
on the table modies elf and with a hat modies table:
I smashed the elf thats on the table which has a hat (on it).
20 Kyle Johnson
() S
NP
N
N
I
VP
PP
P
on
NP
D
the
N
N
N
table
PP
P
with
NP
D
a
NP
N
N
hat
VP
V
smashed
NP
D
an
N
N
elf
on the table modies smashed the elf and with a hat modies table:
Its on the table with a hat, I smashed the elf.