 Welcome to another e-lecture of our series about constituent analysis. In our e-lecture, constituent analysis first steps, we discuss the main structure of constituents, the underlying terminology, and the central steps of performing a constituent analysis. We finished with a number of problems. Here they are again using a slightly different sentence. John will see the young girl in the park. One problem we discovered concerned branching. How, for example, shall we label particular branching nodes? For example, what about this one? Shouldn't that be another verb phrase? Or a verb plus? Or a verb extra verb one or something similar? Or how many branches should a mother node have? One, as in this noun phrase, John. Two, as in this noun phrase, the park and all the other mother nodes marked in red. Or even three, as in this noun phrase, the young girl. And a third problem concerns specific categories that may have an internal structure or not. For example, take the adjective young. Shouldn't that be an adjectival phrase? Well, these are just three problems showing that an analysis of the kind presented is in many ways inadequate. In the following, I will deal with the internal structure of the central constituents. Adjectival phrase, adverb phrase, noun phrase, verb phrase, and prepositional phrase. In this e-lecture, however, I will only provide you with developmental snapshots of the respective constituent analyses. In an additional series of short analysis videos, I will show the individual steps of building these constituents in a more dynamic fashion using my tablet and our video scribe technique. So consult these short videos for further details. Let us now start and look at the structure of the main constituents. Here is the adjective or more precisely the adjectival phrase. That is an adjective or something more in a sentence such as John was. And then we add, for example, a simple adjective, as in John was happy. Now here, this simple adjective can be represented as an adjectival phrase with one branch, the adjective. If you add a degree adverb as in quite happy, John was quite happy, well, we need a second branch for the degree adverb, quite, so far so good. But what happens if we want to add a prepositional phrase such as with the results? By the way, the prepositional phrase here has been represented as a triangle, which means we are not interested in the internal structure of the PP at this point in time. So what shall we do with was happy with the results? Here the prepositional phrase with the results, well, builds a constituent together with happy. Happy with the results form a constituent. You can easily replace this by so, quite so. So the proform test tells you happy with the results is a constituent. Well, a solution to this problem is a structure like this where we insert a new mother node, a second adjectival phrase into our tree. The problem, however, is now that we have two nodes labeled adjectival phrase. To avoid this problem, it was suggested to call the intermediate node adjective bar. You know this sort of labeling from maths where you have a derived element from x called x bar. So here a bar is now an intermediate constituent between adjectival phrase and the head, the adjective. It is an intermediate constituent derived from the head. So much for adjectives. Let's now look at adverbs or more precisely adverb phrase. And you will see that the situation is very similar. They exist independently. Here we have one adverb, which is the head of an adverb phrase. And if we insert a degree adverb like quite, well, then we have the adverb phrase with two branches quite independently. Well, and if we want to add a prepositional phrase, well, then we insert a new common mother node again, quite independently of other people. Again, we represent the prepositional phrase by means of a triangle. That means we're not interested in its internal structure at this point. So we have a structure similar to that of adjectival phrases. And again, we have two phrasal nodes. Well, and by analogy with adjectival phrases, we call the internal node adverb bar. So we have another intermediate level. The next constituent to look at is the noun phrase. So we can consider the noun phrase, the object noun phrase in John likes something. As usual, a simple noun phrase such as John likes flowers can be represented as a noun phrase just with a head. If we add a determiner, we need a second branch. John likes the flowers. And here we have the determiner preceding the head noun. Well, and if we add a prepositional phrase, we insert an intermediate constituent again, the flowers from the garden. And by analogy with adjectival phrases and adverb phrases, we rename the intermediate noun phrase to N bar. Let's look at the verb phrase next. A simple verb phrase such as John sang can be represented by means of a verb phrase with one branch again. Well, and if we add an object, we need a second branch. John sang a song. Well, and a prepositional phrase such as John sang a song in the garden requires another internal node. But now we have two nodes verb phrase again. So let's rename it and insert verb bar here. John sang a song in the garden. By the way, the structure will have to be expanded because in the garden eventually will not be the daughter to VP, but the daughter to another verb bar, but that's a slightly different story. Finally, let's take the prepositional phrase as in John went into the house. And prepositional phrases normally consist of the prepositional head into, in this case, and a noun phrase as a modifier. In this case, again, represented by means of a triangle. So in other words, we are not interested in the internal structure of the noun phrase at this point. If we now add an initial adverb such as right into the house, we have to expand the structure. Now we have two categories prepositional phrase again, where the intermediate one by analogy with what we did with all the other categories should be renamed to p bar. Having analyzed adjectival phrases, adverb phrases, noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases, let's now summarize our findings. All constituents looked at have a similar structure. By the way, the intermediate bar level categories n bar, ad bar, a bar, v bar and p bar will henceforth be written as a apostrophe adverb apostrophe, noun apostrophe and so on. This is orthographically much simpler. Nevertheless, we will still refer to them as a bar, ad bar, n bar and so on. And all these constituents, they have a head. In an adjectival phrase, it's the adjective in an adverb phrase, the adverb in a noun phrase, the noun and so on. And they all have an optional element that is the daughter to the phrasal category that dominates the entire constituent. This element is collectively referred to as the specifier. So in an adjectival phrase, the specifier is a degree adverb. In an adverb phrase, the specifier is a degree adverb. In a noun phrase, it's a determiner and so on. So the term specifier is a collective term for the daughter category dominated by a p, ad v p, n p and so on. Furthermore, all constituents somehow allow the possibility of theoretically infinitely expanding the intermediate categories. So an adjectival phrase may have several a bar levels, an adverb phrase several adverb levels, an n p several n bars, a v p several v bars. Thus we have a convincing format of exhibiting recursion. One of the central principles of natural language. Let's illustrate that using the noun phrase a student. This is a simple noun phrase. If we add an adjectival phrase, we need an additional n bar node, a blond student. And if we make that even larger and generate the noun phrase for a blond student of physics, well, we need a further n bar node, a blond student of physics. And this could go on and on so we could generate a blond student of physics from London and so on and so forth. The situation is slightly different with prepositional phrases. Here it is not p bar that can be expanded, but it is the n bar node, which is part of the noun phrase. That realizes recursion because a possible daughter of n bar is the prepositional phrase itself. And this prepositional phrase, of course, contains another noun phrase with another n bar and so on and so forth. And these principles allow us to generate constructions such as right across the river near the pond by the road. Our observations, our structures can now be generalized. For this purpose, we first of all, to make it as general as possible, we replace all heads of all these constituents by a variable x. So instead of having adjective, we call it x instead of adverb, we call it x instead of noun x and so on and so forth. And now we can derive the following principle. Any constituent xp has an optional specifier. The daughter of the constituent xp is x bar, which we write with an apostrophe. Remember, x bar can be expanded recursively. Well, if the head of the entire constituent is the category x, an adjective, a noun, an adverb and so on. This scheme has become known as the x bar syntax scheme. And it was first initiated in 1970 when Noam Chomsky wrote his article, Remarks on Nominalization. The first textbook about x bar syntax was published in 1977 by Ray Jackendorf. Today, the x bar syntax system constitutes the core of the phrase structure component of generative grammar. So this is it. I hope I could show to you the basic principles of x bar syntax. To do this, I only use the five constituents adjectival phrase, adverb phrase, noun phrase, verb phrase and prepositional phrase. To find further details about these constituents, consult my supplementary video scribes. What I have not shown yet is how we combine these constituents to sentences. I will show this in an additional e-lecture entitled More on Constitutions 2. So, see you again there. Until then, have a nice time.