Re: What is branching

From: Greg Lee (greg_at_ling.lll.hawaii.edu)
Date: 12/11/04 

Date: 11 Dec 2004 23:57:48 GMT

endipatterson@yahoo.com wrote:
> By the question mark I assume that you think that the question does not
> make sense to you.

> I'll put it this way. A left branching language is one where the
> adjectives and relative clauses come before the noun.

> A right branching language is one where the adjectives and relative
> clauses come after the noun.

I think it's the other way around, at least for adjectives.

For a constituent containing a simple and a complex constituent,
you have right branching when the complex constituent is to the
right, and left branching when it is to the left.

Adjective and relative clauses modify nouns (some say N-bar instead of
noun, here). A modifier of an expression of category C is something
which when combined with a C yields an expression of that same
category C. Thus, an adjective combines with a noun to give a noun
and so counts as a modifier. This is a recursive pattern, because
a modified noun, itself being a noun, can be further modified to give
a noun, which can be further modified to give a noun, and so on.

When a simple adjective combines with a following noun consisting of
a noun and an adjective (or some other noun modifier), this is a
right branching structure.

> Reference is from the noun with the adjectives and relative clauses as
> branches.

> We could take adjectives and relative clauses as the "trunk of the
> tree" and have nouns as the branches, but we don't.

But if you want to stick to the truth, you must represent modified
nouns as nouns, because they can be pronominalized with "one",
which replaces nouns.

> I still don't know if adverbs "branch" from verbs, or whether it only
> refers to nouns, adjectives and relative clauses. I also mentioned
> ideas like prepositions vs postpositions.

The case of adverbs is complicated, because various adverbs modify
various things, but they work like noun modifiers, once you work
out what it is they modify. (Except the patterns are not always
recursive.) Only degree adverbs such as "completely" or
"conclusively" actually modify verbs. Manner adverbs modify
verb phrases. Sentence adverbs (so-called) like "probably" modify
sentences. Place and time adverbs modify either verb phrases or
sentences. McCawley has it worked out in his book _The Syntactic
Phenomena of English_. 

-- 
Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>

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