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In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences.〔For a comprehensive discussion of branching, see Berg (2009:34ff.).〕 Assuming that the language is being written or transcribed from left to right, parse trees that grow down and to the right are ''right-branching'', and parse trees that grow down and to the left are ''left-branching''. The direction of branching reflects the position of heads in phrases, and in this regard, right-branching structures are ''head-initial'', whereas left-branching structures are ''head-final''.〔Concerning the correlation between head position and branching direction, see Payne (2006:194).〕 English has both right-branching (head-initial) and left-branching (head-final) structures, although it is more right-branching than left-branching.〔The tendency for English to be right-branching is widely acknowledged, e.g. van Riemsdijk and Williams (1986:211).〕 Other languages such as Japanese and Turkish are strongly left-branching (head-final). ==Examples== Languages typically construct phrases with a head word (or nucleus) and zero or more ''dependents'' (modifiers). The following phrases show the phrase heads in bold. Examples of left-branching phrases (= head-final phrases): ::the house - Noun phrase (NP) ::very happy - Adjective phrase (AP) ::too slowly - Adverb phrase (AdvP) Examples of right-branching phrases (= head-initial phrases): ::laugh loudly - Verb phrase (VP) ::with luck - Prepositional phrase (PP) ::that it happened - Subordinator phrase (SP = subordinate clause) Examples of phrases that contain both left- and right-branching (= head-medial phrases): ::the house there - Noun phrase (NP) ::very happy with it - Adjective phrase (AP) ::only laugh loudly - Verb phrase (VP) Concerning phrases such as ''the house'' and ''the house there'', this article assumes the traditional NP analysis, meaning that the noun is deemed to be head over the determiner. On a DP-analsyis (determiner phrase), the phrase ''the house'' would be right-branching instead of left-branching. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Branching (linguistics)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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