ABSTRACT
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. We will see how constituents are represented in tree diagrams, and start to investigate how languages differ in terms of constituency.
