Full Trees
The nature of branching is most visible with full trees. The following trees have been carefully chosen to best illustrate the extent to which a structure can be entirely left- or entirely right-branching. The following sentence is completely left-branching. The constituency-based trees are on the left, and the dependency-based trees are on the right:
The category Po (= possessive) is used to label possessive 's. The following sentence is completely right-branching:
Most structures in English are, however, not completely left- or completely right-branching, but rather they combine both. The following trees illustrate what can be seen as a stereotypical combination of left- and right-branching in English:
Determiners (e.g. the) always and subjects (e.g. the child) usually appear on left branches in English, but infinitival verbs (e.g. try, eat) and the verb particle to usually appear on right branches. In the big picture, right-branching structures tend to outnumber the left-branching structures in English, which means that trees usually grow down to the right.
Read more about this topic: Branching (linguistics)
Famous quotes containing the words full and/or trees:
“The Helicon of too many poets is not a hill crowned with sunshine and visited by the Muses and the Graces, but an old, mouldering house, full of gloom and haunted by ghosts.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“I do not know but it is too much to read one newspaper a week. I have tried it recently, and for so long it seems to me that I have not dwelt in my native region. The sun, the clouds, the snow, the trees say not so much to me. You cannot serve two masters.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)