Constituent
In linguistics, a constituent refers to a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a sentence. These units can include phrases, clauses, or individual words that form a meaningful and grammatically coherent part of a sentence. Identifying constituents is important for understanding the structure and syntax of a language.
5 Key excerpts on "Constituent"
eBook - ePub- Gerald Nelson(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 Introducing sentence structure 1.1 The Constituents of a sentence Consider the following sentence: My father retired when he was sixty. The sentence consists of seven words in a specific order. However, it is not simply a sequence of seven individual words. Instead, certain words ‘go together’ to form meaningful units, as follows: [My father] [retired] [when he was sixty]. One of these units (retired) consists of just one word, while the others are multi-word combinations. Regardless of their length, however, these are the basic ‘building blocks’ of the sentence, and they are known in grammar as the Constituents of the sentence. A Constituent is a word or a string of words that behaves grammatically and semantically as a unit. So our sentence consists of seven words but only three Constituents. Each Constituent has its own grammatical function: my father, for example, functions as the Subject (1.4) and when he was sixty functions as an Adjunct (1.8). Every Constituent has a complete meaning in itself, and for that reason, every Constituent (except the verb) can be replaced by a single word: [My father] [retired] [when he was sixty]. → [He] [retired] [then]. Similarly: [After the robbery], [the thieves] [drove] [to a safe house]. → [Then], [they] [drove] [there]. [The postman] [left] [the package] [on my doorstep]. → [He] [left] [it] [there]. [Paul] [married] [his girlfriend] [last August]. → [He] [married] [her] [then]. When you begin analysing the structure of a sentence, it is useful to apply this One-word Substitution Test, because it provides a useful initial overview of the sentence Constituents. 1.2 The Grammatical Hierarchy In grammar, there are only three types of Constituents: words, phrases, and clauses...
eBook - ePub- Kersti Börjars, Kate Burridge(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These structural units are called Constituents. Constituents, then, are strings of words which function as a group at some level; they work like linguistic building blocks that combine to make larger and larger Constituents. As speakers of a language we intuitively know that some words in a sentence are linked more closely than others. The arguments we use to translate these intuitions into more formal criteria are known as constituency tests. The most important constituency tests are substitution, unit of sense/sentence fragment, movement and coordination. It is not uncommon to get contradictory results when applying the constituency tests and in these cases it is important first of all to think about why a particular test gives a different result. Also, one can test for an alternative arrangement to see if that gives a more unambiguous result. We can represent Constituent structure using brackets to show the groupings of words. However, the more usual way is by using tree diagrams. Exercises 1. Identifying morphemes The following piece is taken from ‘Here Comes the Son,’ a review of the 2009 film about John Lennon (N#803:48). Divide each word that has internal structure into morphemes and indicate whether each morpheme is free or bound. If bound, state whether derivational or inflectional. Are there any grammatical free morphemes? Discuss any problems which you encountered in your analysis. But here we have Nowhere Boy, a new biopic of John Lennon, and the surprise is that it’s rather fresh and watchable. Director Sam Taylor Wood avoids the Beatles clichés by focusing on John’s early years, before he left for Hamburg with Paul and George, and long before he became more famous than Jesus. 2...
eBook - ePub- Liliane Haegeman, Herman Wekker(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They form grammatical units within the sentence, and any variation in the order of words must respect the fact that there are such units. These grammatical units (sentence, clause, phrase, word and morpheme) are the Constituents of a sentence. We have also briefly noted in Chapter 1 that there are various processes which help us to identify such Constituents. In sentences (11)–(16) above, for example, at and Harvard can be seen to be tightly connected: they form a Constituent. They are in fact only rarely separated, and the resulting sentence is then not very good. (22) ?Harvard George allegedly cheated at. Here follows a list of some of the tests which can be used to identify strings like at Harvard as Constituents: (a) The string at Harvard can be replaced by one word (there) : (b) One can ask a question of the following form: Where did George allegedly cheat? and the answer will be at Harvard. Where corresponds to (or ‘questions’) at Harvard. (c) At and Harvard can be moved around together, as the sentences (11)–(16) illustrate. (d) At Harvard can be the focus element X in a cleft sentence: It was at Harvard that George allegedly cheated. These tests are used to determine the Constituent-hood of at Harvard. Their applicability may be summed up as follows: At+Harvard (a) Substitution by one word : yes (b) Questioned by one word : yes (c) Move together : yes (d) Can be the focus element X in a cleft sentence : yes It is the purpose of this chapter to break down sentences into their components: their Constituent structure will be analysed. We shall be looking at the Constituents in hierarchical order, starting with the largest unit of our analysis, the sentence, going down to the level of the clause, the next unit down on the scale, and then down to the phrase and to the word. The structure of words will only be discussed where relevant. Throughout this book the Constituent structure of sentences, clauses, phrases, etc...
eBook - ePub- Maggie Tallerman(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 How do we identify Constituents? This chapter returns to the theme of sentence structure, introduced in Chapter 1. We saw in Chapter 4 that phrases consist of a head word and its complements, plus any optional modifiers to that head. In this chapter we discover how to identify phrases, and how to distinguish a phrase from a random string of words. The phrases which make up sentences are known as the ConstituentS of a sentence. As we saw in Chapter 4, phrases are embedded within larger phrases, forming hierarchical structures. We will see how Constituents are represented in tree diagrams, which are a representation of this hierarchical structure, and start to investigate how languages differ in terms of constituency. 5.1 DISCOVERING THE STRUCTURE OF SENTENCES Section 5.1.1 demonstrates the existence of syntactic structure, in particular by looking at ambiguous phrases and sentences. Section 5.1.2 introduces three syntactic tests for Constituent structure, and Section 5.1.3 examines the ways in which linguists formally represent Constituent structure. 5.1.1 Evidence of structure in sentences One way to show that syntactic structure actually exists is to examine sentences which are syntactically ambiguous; that is, sentences which have more than one meaning. Not all ambiguity is syntactic: some is lexical, as in Sam went down to the bank ; did she go to ‘the river bank’ or ‘the place where money is kept’? In other cases, though, ambiguity arises because we can’t tell which words group together to form a phrase. Thisis syntactic ambiguity. For instance, a sentence like the following appeared in a British national newspaper, causing an unforeseen breakdown in communication. (1) Black cab drivers went on strike yesterday. Readers wrote in to say, what did it matter what colour the drivers were? But, of course, the newspaper actually intended black to modify cab, not to modify cab drivers...
eBook - ePubAnalysing Sentences
An Introduction to English Syntax
- Noel Burton-Roberts(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...1 Sentence structure Constituents DOI: 10.4324/9781003118916-2 Structure This book is about English syntax. As explained in the Introduction, the syntax of a language is a matter of the form, the positioning and the grouping of the elements that figure in the sentences of that language. In a word, it’s about their STRUCTURE. But structure is a very general concept that applies to any complex thing, whether it’s a bicycle, a commercial company, or a carbon molecule. When we say something is ‘complex’ we mean, not that it’s complicated (though of course it may be), but that a it’s divisible into parts (its Constituents), b there are different kinds of parts (different categories of Constituents), c the Constituents are arranged in a certain way, and d each Constituent has a specific function in the structure. When anything can be analysed in this way, it has structure. And it’s crucial that, more often than not, the Constituents of a complex thing are themselves complex. In other words, the parts themselves have parts and these may in turn have further parts. When this is so, we’re dealing with a hierarchy of parts and with hierarchical structure. It’s obvious, for example, that a complex thing like a bicycle isn’t just a random collection of bits and pieces. Suppose you gathered together all the components of a bicycle: metal tubes, hubs, spokes, chain, cable and so on. Try to imagine the range of objects you could construct by fixing them together. Some of these objects might be bicycles, but others wouldn’t remotely resemble a bicycle – though they might make interesting sculptures. And there would probably be intermediate cases – things we’d probably want to say were bicycles, if only because they resembled bicycles more than anything else. So, only some of the possible ways of fitting bicycle components together produce a bicycle...
