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12
Trees
It is a fundamental of linguistic structure that some parts of the string of linguistic
elements belong together more closely than others. The nature of the
‘belonging together’ might be in doubt, but the basic observation is at the root
of theorising about linguistic structure. So given a string of phonemes such as
/dr�ŋkəndraivəz/ we would want to say that the /ən/ go together more
closely than the /nd/, for instance, or given a string of words like Drunken
drivers cause suffering we would want to say that drunken and drivers go together
more closely than drivers and cause. An obvious way of capturing this intuition
graphically is to bracket the bits that go together, the constituents of the
larger construction: [drunken drivers][cause suffering],for instance. This allows
us to capture the difference between a [French history] teacher ‘a teacher of
French history’ and a French [history teacher] ‘a history teacher who is French’,
and so on. If we want to say what status each of the bits has, we can use a
labelled bracketing to do it: [drunken drivers] NP [cause suffering] VP (where NP
means ‘noun phrase’ and VP means ‘verb phrase’, assuming that these are the
categories you wish to mark). There are two problems with this: it becomes
typographically complex, and, with less simple examples, becomes extremely
difficult to work out. Consider (1), for example. Although it would be possible
to label opening brackets as well as closing ones, to make it easier to see which
pairs belonged together, (1) would never be easy to read.
(1) [[[drunken] ADJ [drivers] N ] NP [[cause] V [[immense] ADJ
[suffering] N ] NP ] VP ] S
A labelled tree provides an exact equivalent of the labelled bracketing in (1) which,
although it takes up more room on the page, is considerably easier to read. See (2).