5.4: Analyzing a PS Tree

5.4.1 Analyzing a Phrase Structure Tree, from Sarah Harmon

Video Script

Catherine showed you a number of different types of trees, how to break a phrase down into various types of trees. I thought I would take a minute to do a version of that, as a way to show you how to analyze a specific phrase. I will warn you that when we linguists get a little funky and decide to create new sentences to showcase to people; we tend to use a theme. My theme is Archer, the TV show, so the character names and some of the descriptions that you will see refer to Archer. I’m a bit of a fan, but you can use them as examples in any way, shape or form.

Let's take a basic noun phrase-verb phrase-noun phrase kind of sentence. By that I mean, something that doesn't have too many moving parts, just to get you started. Sterling sees Lana. I'm going to use sentence, instead of TP, but same idea. You always know that your top most node, you start from up here and then you work your way down. It's always important to include intermediary steps. The reason is, we want to be able to showcase all of the possible structure, just like when you're building a sizable building and not just like a little box. You want to be able to not just put up the four corners of the walls; you need to be able to show the intermediary steps in between. Same thing with phrase structure trees. By the way, I am following a very common, simplified version of X-Bar Theory that shows proper names just directly coming off the NP node. That's just to make your life a little easier; if you're in an upper division syntax class, things get a little more complicated. For this level, I won't do that; I will keep it simple.

Two more sentences, where you have noun phrases and where the noun is modified. In this case car has a determiner with it an article; waffles has an adjective with it. Notice, too, the different structures. We do want to keep everything on the line we do not want to have all sorts of crazy lines when you do a phrase structure tree. In fact, when I was taught to do phrase structure trees, I was taught to do them on graphing paper, so that every line had its place, and you could see relationships very clearly. I've mimic that in the slides so that you get the idea.

This is an example of a propositional phrase down here. And an example of a coordinate structure; coordinates mean that you're using some kind of conjunction, like and, but, or; frequently it's and. They have to be the same type of phrase. Pam and Cheryl are both proper nouns, so we can do this, we cannot say Cyril works with Pam and quietly. That isn't going to work, and that sentence probably made no sense to you—it should not have—because the Phrase Structure Rules say that if you're going to coordinate, it has to be the same kind of phrase in each part.

This is an example of a noun phrase that has both an adjective that describes it, as well as a prepositional phrase. This gives you a longer type of phrase that you can see splayed out here.

I wanted to also showcase a type of sentence where you have an auxiliary verb. This explains why we even have this V-bar level to begin with. We want to express that this auxiliary has the tense, aspect, mood, all the other inflections, but the main verb is what is being modified by the noun phrase, in this case. We do this to show the relationship between each of these phrases each of these pieces.

I wanted to showcase a little bit with a pronoun here. And one example of an embedded sentence, when you have a smaller clause, as it is usually called. In a larger clause, you have the different setup. Here you have a sentence down here or a TP—Tense Phrase, if you wish—and then it's embedded within that verb phrase. This is something that in colloquy will get worked on a little bit more.

Know in your quiz for the section, you will not have to do any phrase structure trees. However, you will have to start understanding a little bit about this relationship between heads and complements, phrases and everything between. It is wise to work on that a little bit. we'll play with this more later.