ABSTRACT
This chapter examines some of the different types of relationships that constituents bear to each other. It considers how these relations are marked in the grammars of different languages and whether such relationships can be satisfactorily described in the type of constituent structure grammars. Words combine to form phrases; phrases combine to form clauses; and clauses combine to form sentences. Any phrase contains a special constituent called the head, which is the central, characteristic and obligatory constituent. The fact that the relationships are functional means that more labels are needed for the different types of relationship: head-modifier, attribute-entity and possessor-possessed. Different languages employ different formal means of marking dependency relations – word order, the use of ‘markers’, and case inflections. The chapter considers word order and the use of markers in four constructions: noun phrases, prepositional phrases, genitive constructions, and sentence constituents in English. It then looks briefly at comparable constructions in three other languages: Akan, Scots Gaelic and Turkish.
