ABSTRACT
Th is chapter returns to the theme of sentence str ucture, introduced in Chapter 1. We saw in Chapter 4 that phrases consist of a head word and its complements, plus any optional modifi ers to that head. In this chapter we discover how to identify phrases, and how to distinguish a phrase from a random string of words. Th e phrases which make up sentences are known as the CONSTITUENTS of a sentence. We will see how constituents are represented in tree diagrams, and start to investigate how languages diff er in terms of constituency.
