ABSTRACT
In linguistic work each of the ‘component parts’ of a sentence is a ‘constituent’ and the whole procedure is ‘constituent structure analysis’. This chapter focuses on the two closely related operations of sentences: the analysis of the sentence into its constituents and the grammatical description of these constituents. The first operation explores how to break a sentence down into its constituent parts, and which strings of words are, and which are not, constituents. The second operation describes how constituents differ from each other, how each type is constructed, how they combine with each other, what order they can, or must, occur in, and so on. This involves naming the different types of constituent so that one can identify them. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the hierarchical structure of the analysis. The hierarchical nature of the analysis illustrates what appears to be a universal principle of the organization of human languages, that they have hierarchical syntactic structures.
