Node (linguistics)

Before the emergence of the X-bar theory, thus in the period between Chomsky (1957) and Jackendoff (1977), syntactic structures were represented based on phrase structure rules (PSR). • The man studies linguistics enthusiastically. This sentence involves the following five PSRs: • S → NP VP • NP → Det N (the man) • NP → N (linguistics) • AdvP → Adv (enthusiastically) • VP → V NP AdvP (studies linguistics enthusiastically) With a tree diagram, the sentence's structure can be depicted as in Figure 1. All the points illustrated by circles and diamonds are nodes in Figure 1, and the former are called nonterminal nodes and the latter terminal nodes. Note that the PSR does not specify how a node branches because the parent (the left side of the arrow) can diverge into any number of daughters (the right side of the arrow); thus, a node under the PSR can branch into any number of different nodes, allowing non-branching, binary-branching, ternary-branching, and so forth. == Nodes under the X-bar theory ==

If we illustrate the structure of the sentence above in accordance with the X-bar schema, we obtain the structure in Figure 2 . Under the X-bar theory, a node necessarily divides into two branches because of the binarity principle. This also means that zero-level projections (heads) serve as terminal nodes and intermediate and maximal projections as nonterminal nodes. == Nodes under the minimalist program ==

Under the minimalist program, syntactic structures are formed by iterative applications of the syntactic operation Merge, which serves to connect two elements into one. == References==

• linguistics • syntax • generative grammar • constituent • syntactic tree • phrase structure rule • X-bar theory • Minimalist Program