Gerude Stein.
Syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence, and how the words are grouped. The words in the sentence
The child found the puppy
may be grouped into (the child) and (found the puppy), corresponding to the subject and predicate of the sentence. A further division gives (the child) ((found) (the puppy)), and finally the individual words :
((the) (child)) ((found) (the) (puppy)).
It is easier to see the parts and subparts of the sentence in a tree diagram :
The 'tree' is upside down with its ' root' being the entire sentence, the child found the puppy, and its 'leaves' being the individual words, the, child, found, the, puppy. The tree conveys the same information as the nested parentheses, but more perspicuously. the groupings and subgroupings reflect the hierarchical structure of the tree.
The tree diagram shows among other things that the phrase found the puppy is naturally devided into two branches, the two groups, found and the puppy. A different division, say found the and puppy, is unnatural in the sense that speakers of Englis would not use found the by itself or as an answer to the question 'what didi you find ?' An answer might be the puppy but not found the. in fact, found the cannot be an answer to any question. A word such as found never occours in a single group followed only by the.
Other sentences with the same meaning as the original sentence can be formed, for example :
It was the puppy the child found.
The puppy was found by the child.
In all such arrangements the puppy remains inact. Found the does not remain intact, nor can the sentence be changed by moving found the around. All these facts show that the puppy is a natural structure whereas found the is not.
Only one tree representation consistent with an English speaker's syntactic knowledge can be drawn for the sentence The child found the puppy. But the phrase synthetic buffalo hides has two such trees, one of each of its two meaning :
Every sentence has one or mare corresponding constituent structures coposed of hierarchically arranged parts called constituents. These may be graphically depicted as tree structures. Each tree corresponds to one of the possible meanings. Structural ambiguity can be explicitly accounted for by multiple tree structures.
