To the above sentence, "He studies linguistics at the university," someone could reply, "Oh, she does, too." The word "does," here, stands for the entire V-bar phrase, "studies linguistics at the university", thus implying the existence of this phrase as a complete unit of the whole sentence. Though X-bar clauses may seem arbitrary and unneeded, their existence can be confirmed by substitution. The predicate parses the same way in both theories. The noun phrase (NP) that is the subject of the sentence is located in specifier of the verb phrase. In this theory, the sentences is modeled as a verb phrase (VP). (This diagram uses the proper overbar notation.) There is no word in the sentence which explicitly acts as the head of the inflectional phrase, but this slot is usually considered to contain the unspoken "present tense" implied by the tense marker on the verb "studies".Ī head-driven phrase structure grammar might parse this sentence The complement of the IP is the predicate of the sentence, a verb phrase (VP). Its specifier is the noun phrase (NP) which acts as the subject of the sentence.
A transformational grammar theory might parse this sentence as the following diagram shows: Consider the sentence He studies linguistics at the university. See word order.įor more complex utterances, different theories of grammar assign different X-bar theory elements to different phrase types in different ways. Thus, determiners and adjectives always precede their nouns if they are in the same noun phrase. In English, specifiers precede the X-bar that contains the head. The DetP and NP above have no adjuncts or complements, so they end up being very linear. Note that branches with empty specifiers, adjuncts, complements, and heads are often omitted, to reduce visual clutter. The word cat is the noun which acts as the head of the noun phrase (NP). Thus it is contained in the determiner phrase (DetP). The word the is a determiner (specifically an article), which is a type of specifier for nouns. The noun phrase "the cat" might be rendered like this: Note that a complement-containing X' may be distinguished from an adjunct-containing X' by the fact that the complement has an X (head) as a sister, whereas an adjunct has X-bar as a sister. The above example maps naturally onto the left-to-right phrase order used in English. However, in any given language, usually only one handedness for each rule is observed. Because the rules are recursive, there is an infinite number of possible structures that could be generated, including smaller trees that omit optional parts, structures with multiple complements, and additional layers of XPs and X′s of various types.īecause all of the rules allow combination in any order, the left-right position of the branches at any point may be reversed from what is shown in the example. The following diagram illustrates one way the rules might be combined to form a generic XP structure. (a head-first example showing one complement) Another kind of X-bar consists of an X (the head of the phrase) and any number of complements (possibly zero), in either order. Not all XPs contain X′s with adjuncts, so this rewrite rule is "optional".ģ. (X Template:Unicode → X Template:Unicode, adjunct) One kind of X-bar consists of an X-bar and an adjunct, in either order. An X Phrase consists of an optional specifier and an X-bar, in either order. All three representations are presented below.ġ. These rules can be expressed in English, as "rewrite" rules (useful for programmers), or visually as parse trees. There are three "syntax assembly" rules which form the basis of X-bar theory.
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