Competing Theories
Alternate theoretical approaches to syntax make different assumptions regarding what is considered a constituent. In mainstream phrase structure grammar (and its derivatives), individual words are constituents in and of themselves as well as being parts of other constituents, whereas in dependency grammar, certain core words in each phrase are not a constituent by themselves, but only members of a phrasal constituent. The following trees show the same sentence in two different theoretical representations, with a phrase structure representation on the left and a dependency grammar representation on the right. In both trees, a constituent is understood to be the entire tree or any labelled subtree (a node plus all the nodes dominated by that node); note that words like killed and with, for instance, form subtrees (and are considered constituents) in the phrase structure representation but not in the dependency structure representation.
Read more about this topic: Constituent (linguistics)
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