Examples
Languages typically construct phrases with a head word (or nucleus) and zero or more dependents (modifiers). The following phrases show the phrase heads in bold.
Examples of left-branching phrases (= head-final phrases):
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- the house
- very happy
- too slowly
Examples of right-branching phrases (= head-initial phrases):
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- laugh loudly
- with luck
- that it happened
Examples of phrases that contain both left- and right-branching (= head-medial phrases):
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- the house there
- very happy with it
- only laugh loudly
The syntactic structures of most languages combine left- and right-branching, although most languages tend to favor the one or the other.
Read more about this topic: Branching (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
—Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)