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71 TREES
English without a following consonant, and so the /l/ must belong to the first
syllable; the /l/ in silly is clear not dark, and thus in varieties of English which
make this distinction belongs to the second syllable. Ambisyllabicity breaks the
Single Mother Convention, and strictly speaking means that a structure which
shows this is no longer a tree, although this terminological nicety is largely
ignored.
Finally, we need to note that there is a notational convention for dealing with
trees where one does not wish to give all the detail. A triangle over a particular
piece of language data indicates that the author is not concerned with the internal
structure of that particular section. This is illustrated in (5).
(5)
Extending trees
S
NP VP
Drunken drivers cause immense suffering
Although trees like those outlined above are typically used to display
information about constituency, it is also possible to use trees to show other
things.
Dependency trees directly encode information about headedness which has
to be inferred in constituent structure trees or guaranteed by some complex
mechanism. Dependency trees also give information on constituency.
Dependency trees were developed by Anderson (1971), although slightly
different versions are used by other scholars. A dependency tree is presented
in (6).
(6)
V
N N
A A
Drunken drivers cause immense suffering