Video Script

We’re starting to look at how our minds organize sentences. We’ll see that
within each sentence, our mental grammar groups words together into
phrases and phrases into sentences. We saw in the last unit how we can
use tree diagrams to show these relationships between words, phrases and
sentences.

The theory of syntax that we’re working within this class is called X-bar
theory. X-bar theory makes the claim that every single phrase in every
single sentence in the mental grammar of every single human language,
has the same core organization. Here’s a tree diagram that shows us that
basic organization. Let’s look at it more closely. According to x-bar theory,
every phrase has a head. The head is the terminal node of the phrase. It’s
the node that has no daughters. Whatever category the head is determines
the category of the phrase. So if the head is a Noun, then our phrase is a
Noun Phrase, abbreviated NP. If the head is a verb (V) then the phrase is a
verb phrase (VP). And likewise, if the head is a preposition (P), then the
phrase is a preposition phrase (PP), and Adjective Phrases (AP) have
Adjectives as their heads.

So the bottom-most level of this structure is called the head level, and the
top level is called the phrase level. What about the middle level of the
structure? Syntacticians love to give funny names to parts of the mental
grammar, and this middle level of a phrase structure is called the bar level;
that’s where the theory gets its name: X-bar theory.

So if every phrase in every sentence in every language has this structure,

then it must be the case that every phrase has a head. But you’ll notice in
this diagram that these other two pieces, the specifier and
the complement, which we haven’t talked about yet, are in parentheses.
That’s to show that they’re optional — they might not necessarily be in
every phrase. If they’re optional, that means that it should be possible to
have a phrase that consists of just a single head — and if we observe
some grammaticality judgments, we can think of phrases and even whole
sentences that seem to contain a head and nothing else. We could have a
noun phrase that consists of a single noun — Coffee? or Spiderman! We
could have verb phrase that has nothing in it but a verb,
like Stop!  or Run! Or an adjective phrase might consist of only a single
adjective, like Nice… or Excellent!
But X-bar theory proposes that phrases can have more in them than just
ahead. A phrase might optionally have another phrase inside it in a position
that is sister to the head and daughter to the bar level. If there’s a phrase in
that position, it’s called the complement. The most common kinds of head-
complement relationship we see are a verb taking an object or a
preposition taking an object. Let’s look at some examples. Here we’ve got a
verb phrase, with the verb drank as its head. That head has the noun
phrase coffee as its sister. The NP coffee is sister to the verb head and
daughter of the V-bar node so it is a complement of the verb.

Here’s another example that has the same structure, but a different
category. The head of this phrase is the preposition near, so the phrase is
a preposition phrase. The complement of the preposition is the noun
phrase campus and the whole phrase is near campus. Try to think of some
other examples of verbs and prepositions that take noun phrases as their
complements.

The other common place we see a head-complement relationship is

between a determiner and a noun. In phrases like my sister, those shoes,
and the weather, the determiner is a head that takes an NP complement.

X-bar theory also proposes that phrase can have a specifier. A specifier is
a phrase that is sister to the bar-level and daughter to the phrase level. The
most common job for specifiers is as the subjects of sentences, so we’ll
look at those in another unit.