In
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
, a right-branching sentence is a
sentence in which the main subject of the sentence is described first, and is followed by a sequence of
modifiers
In linguistics, a modifier is an optional element in phrase structure or clause structure which ''modifies'' the meaning of another element in the structure. For instance, the adjective "red" acts as a modifier in the noun phrase "red ball", provi ...
that provide additional information about the subject. The inverse would be a
Left-branching sentence. The name "right-branching" comes from the English syntax of putting such modifiers to the right of the sentence. For example, the following sentence is right-branching.
:''The dog slept on the doorstep of the house in which it lived.''
Note that the sentence begins with the
subject
Subject ( la, subiectus "lying beneath") may refer to:
Philosophy
*''Hypokeimenon'', or ''subiectum'', in metaphysics, the "internal", non-objective being of a thing
**Subject (philosophy), a being that has subjective experiences, subjective cons ...
, followed by a
verb
A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descri ...
, and then the
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ai ...
of the verb. This is then followed by a modifier that more closely defines the object, and this modifier is itself modified by a subsequent modifier.
Right-branching sentences are generally held to be easier to read than other similarly-complex grammatical structures in English, perhaps because other branching styles require the listener to hold more information in memory to be able to correctly interpret the sentence.
See also
*
Branching (linguistics)
In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences. Assuming that the language is being written or transcribed from left to right, parse trees that grow down and to the right are ''right-bran ...
References
*
*
English grammar
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