Mark Twain
Other languages have different phrase structure rules, hence different tree structures. In swedish the determiner may follow the noun in some NPs, for example, in mannen, 'the man' (mann, 'man', + en, 'the' ). The ungrammatical tree of English is a grammatical tree structure in Swedish :
The grammar of Japanese cntains the phrase structure rule
PP---NP P
but not the rule
PP --- P NP
Such differences between these languages and English are reflected in the phrase structure rules of the respective grammars.
In English the verb is always the first member of the verb phrase, as can be seen form the VP rule. In German, however, the verb may contains sentences such as
Ich glaube dass Tristan Isolde liebt.
which, if translated word for word, would be 'I believe that Tristan Isolde loves' meaning 'I believe that Tristan loves Isolde'.
Despite these differences in detail, all grammars of all languages have the type of rule we are calling a phrase structure rule, which characterises the structure of phrase, sentences, and syntactic categories of the language.
