Nile Valley University

Assignment:

Phrase structure

Prepared by:
Abdelkhaleg Eltayeb Yousif Hamad

Enaam Abu Almaali Siddeg Ali

Fathiya Abbass Zaroug Elradi

Hamadelneil Bakhet Elemam Mohamed

Ibrahim Hussain Bellal Elnoor

Manal Hamid Ahmed Mohammad

Mnahil Elmofti Abdallah Elmofti

Mohammed Zakaria Ibrahim

Nahid Yousif Eisa Abdallah

Satira Mohamed Ibrahim Daoud

Supervisor by :

Prof .Dr/ mohammed Bakri

April 2020

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 Phrase structure

Phrase structure rules are a type of rewrite rule used to

describe a given language's syntax and are closely associated
with the early stages of transformational grammar, proposed by
Noam Chomsky in 1957.[1] They are used to break down a
natural language sentence into its constituent parts, also known
as syntactic categories, including both lexical categories (parts
of speech) and phrasal categories. A grammar that uses phrase
structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase
structure rules as they are commonly employed operate
according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that
employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency
grammar; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency
grammars, which are based on the dependency relation.[2]

Definition and examples

Phrase structure rules are usually of the following form:

meaning that the constituent is separated into the two

subconstituents and . Some examples for English

are as follows:

The first rule reads: A S (sentence) consists of a NP (noun

phrase) followed by a VP (verb phrase). The second rule reads:
A noun phrase consists of an optional Det (determiner) followed

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by a N (noun). The third rule means that a N (noun) can be
preceded by an optional AP (adjective phrase) and followed by
an optional PP (prepositional phrase). The round brackets
indicate optional constituents.

Beginning with the sentence symbol S, and applying the phrase

structure rules successively, finally applying replacement rules
to substitute actual words for the abstract symbols, it is possible
to generate many proper sentences of English (or whichever
language the rules are specified for). If the rules are correct, then
any sentence produced in this way ought to be grammatically
(syntactically) correct. It is also to be expected that the rules will
generate syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical
sentences, such as the following well-known example:

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

This sentence was constructed by Noam Chomsky as an

illustration that phrase structure rules are capable of generating
syntactically correct but semantically incorrect sentences. Phrase
structure rules break sentences down into their constituent parts.
These constituents are often represented as tree structures
(dendrograms). The tree for Chomsky's sentence can be
rendered as follows:

A constituent is any word or combination of words that is

dominated by a single node. Thus each individual word is a

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constituent. Further, the subject NP Colorless green ideas, the
minor NP green ideas, and the VP sleep furiously are
constituents. Phrase structure rules and the tree structures that
are associated with them are a form of immediate constituent
analysis.

In transformational grammar, systems of phrase structure

rules are supplemented by transformation rules, which act on an
existing syntactic structure to produce a new one (performing
such operations as negation, passivization, etc.). These
transformations are not strictly required for generation, as the
sentences they produce could be generated by a suitably
expanded system of phrase structure rules alone, but
transformations provide greater economy and enable significant
relations between sentences to be reflected in the grammar.

Top down

An important aspect of phrase structure rules is that they

view sentence structure from the top down. The category on the
left of the arrow is a greater constituent and the immediate
constituents to the right of the arrow are lesser constituents.
Constituents are successively broken down into their parts as
one moves down a list of phrase structure rules for a given
sentence. This top-down view of sentence structure stands in
contrast to much work done in modern theoretical syntax. In
Minimalism[3] for instance, sentence structure is generated from
the bottom up. The operation Merge merges smaller constituents
to create greater constituents until the greatest constituent (i.e.
the sentence) is reached. In this regard, theoretical syntax
abandoned phrase structure rules long ago, although their
importance for computational linguistics seems to remain intact.

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Alternative approaches

Constituency vs. dependency

Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed

result in a view of sentence structure that is constituency-based.
Thus, grammars that employ phrase structure rules are
constituency grammars (= phrase structure grammars), as
opposed to dependency grammars,[4] which view sentence
structure as dependency-based. What this means is that for
phrase structure rules to be applicable at all, one has to pursue a
constituency-based understanding of sentence structure. The
constituency relation is a one-to-one-or-more correspondence.
For every word in a sentence, there is at least one node in the
syntactic structure that corresponds to that word. The
dependency relation, in contrast, is a one-to-one relation; for
every word in the sentence, there is exactly one node in the
syntactic structure that corresponds to that word. The distinction
is illustrated with the following trees:

The constituency tree on the left could be generated by phrase

structure rules. The sentence S is broken down into smaller and
smaller constituent parts. The dependency tree on the right could
not, in contrast, be generated by phrase structure rules (at least
not as they are commonly interpreted).

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Representational grammars

A number of representational phrase structure theories of

grammar never acknowledged phrase structure rules, but have
pursued instead an understanding of sentence structure in terms
the notion of schema. Here phrase structures are not derived
from rules that combine words, but from the specification or
instantiation of syntactic schemata or configurations, often
expressing some kind of semantic content independently of the
specific words that appear in them. This approach is essentially
equivalent to a system of phrase structure rules combined with a
noncompositional semantic theory, since grammatical
formalisms based on rewriting rules are generally equivalent in
power to those based on substitution into schemata.

So in this type of approach, instead of being derived from the

application of a number of phrase structure rules, the sentence
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously would be generated by
filling the words into the slots of a schema having the following
structure:

[NP[ADJ N] VP[V] AP[ADV]]

And which would express the following conceptual content:

X DOES Y IN THE MANNER OF Z

Though they are non-compositional, such models are

monotonic. This approach is highly developed within
Construction grammar[5] and has had some influence in Head-
Driven Phrase Structure Grammar[6] and Lexical Functional
Grammar,[7] the latter two clearly qualifying as phrase structure
grammars.

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Sources

 Borsley and Börjars, Non-Transformational Syntax, 2011.

 Laurel J. Brinton, The Structure of Modern English: A
Linguistic Introduction. John Benjamins, 2000
 R.L. Trask, Language, and Linguistics: The Key Concepts,
2nd ed., edited by Peter Stockwell. Routledge, 2007
 Trevor A. Harley, The Psychology of Language: From
Data to Theory, 4th edition. Psychology Press, 2014
 Georgia M. Green and Robert D. Levine, Introduction
to Studies in Contemporary Phrase Structure Grammar.
Cambridge University Press, 1999