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:
“Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“The very dew seemed to hang upon the trees later into the day than usual, as on the sides of mountains.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)