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:
“But since our Saviours death did put some bloud
Into thy face;
Thou art grown fair and full of grace,
Much in request, much sought for as a good.”
—George Herbert (1593–1633)
“Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.
No white nor red was ever seen
So amorous as this lovely green.
Fond lovers, cruel as their flame,
Cut in these trees their mistress’ name:
Little, alas, they know or heed
How far these beauties hers exceed!
Fair trees, wheresoe’er your barks I wound,
No name shall but your own be found.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)