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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 72
In (6), the solid lines show dependency relations, with elements higher up
the tree being the heads of their constructions and governing their dependents
lower down the tree. The dotted lines show lexical filling of nodes – note
that all nodes are terminal nodes in this tree. Linear precedence is shown by
the order of the elements in the tree.
Trees are also used to represent one model of historical relationships
between languages. These trees are not binary, and distance between languages
left-to-right is supposed to indicate closeness of relationship (see (7)). There
are various objections to the family-tree model of language development, but
this is nevertheless a widespread use of tree notation.
(7)
References
West Germanic
English Frisian Dutch German
Anderson, John M. (1971). The Grammar of Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gazdar, Gerald, Ewan Klein, Geoffrey Pullum & Ivan Sag (1985). Generalized Phrase
Structure Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sampson, Geoffrey (1975). The single mother condition. Journal of Linguistics 11:
1–11.