draw syntax tree for phrase the small one
Although what is "correct" always depends on theory, there are various things that are definitely not quite right with your trees.
Tree #1
the founder of the church of England
The whole thing taken together is an NP (it starts with a definite article and can serve as the subject of a sentence, so it is something nominal, not prepositional), so the root of the tree should be labelled NP rather than PP.
In general, an XP must always have an X as its head.
Thus, when there is an NP, there must be an N as the head, and for a PP, there is a P head. This principle is not always follwed in your trees.
The same goes for NPs. Now I don't know what theory you are using, because there are basically two opposing approaches:
1) Make the whole thing an NP, i.e. a phrase with an N head to which the determiner is a specifier:
The head of the NP is the N "church". The DP consisting of the D "the" is a specifier because it is the sister of N' and daughter of NP.
2) Make the whole thing a DP, i.e. a phrase with a D head to which the noun phrase is a complement:
The head of the DP is the D "the". The complement of this D head is an NP which consists of the single N head "church".
I will not go into a discussion of the motivations of each approach (and neither into a discussion about whether you should leave redundant bar levels away), but you need to decide what your phrase and its head is supposed to be. Having an NP branching into a D and an N violates the X-bar scheme because a phrase must have an identifiable head and can not branch into two lexical items (D and N); one of them must be an X' or an XP. Either you make it an NP with an N head and the DP as a specifier, or you make it a DP with a D head and the NP as a complement.
Assuming that you want to have the whole as an NP, I'll continue with the first approach.
So a first rudimentary picture of your tree looks like this:
You can now argue about whether the PP "of the church of England" is an adjunct rather than a complement, but in this case I find the latter approach more plausible. So within N', we have an N head "founder" and a PP complement "of the church of England":
Now about the PP. As said above, the head of the PP must be a P of which the complement is an NP, thus:
The NP "the church of England" again branches into the determiner and the N' "church of England":
Within this N', "church" is the head and "of England" is a PP complement to the N head "church":
Again, you could also argue about making the PP "of England" an adjunction, but here too I find a complement more plausible.
The PP "of England" itself looks similar as the other PPs, with the difference that the NP "England" doesn't have a DP specifier:
And now you are done with your tree.
The whole phrase is an NP, of which the head is the noun "founder" and the PP "of the church of England" is a complement with a P head "of". The determiner "the" is located in specifier position to the NP. the PP "of the church of England" later branches into another PP "of England".
Tree #2
the brother of the girl who left us
I'll keep my explanation a bit briefer here.
Similarly as above, you have an NP in which the N' consists of the N head "brother" and a PP complement "of the girl who left us":
Within the PP, the complement NP "the girl" is modified by adjunction of the relative clause "who left us":
It is also possible to locate the relative clause as an adjunct to the N' "girl" rather than the whole NP "the girl":
For reasons that are too complicated to discuss here, I will assume adjunction to the NP rather than N'.
The difficult part now is how to handle the relative clause "who left us". The assumption is the following:
Within the relative clause CP, the relative pronoun "who" is assumed to start in the subject position, i.e. in the specifier position of IP (SpecI), because the NP it refers to ("the girl") is the subject of the sentence:
This NP pronoun is then moved to the specifier of CP (SpecC) to get into the position of a relative pronoun:
The moved pronoun leaves a trace (t_i) and is now located in SpecC position, where it serves as a relataive pronoun referring to "girl".
The tree as a whole thus looks as follows:
To summarize, the whole expression is an NP, where the head N "brother" has a PP complement "of the girl who ...", and within that PP complement, the NP "the girl" is modified by adjunction of a relative clause CP in which the NP "who" was moved from SpecI to SpecC to serve as a relative pronoun referring to "the girl".
General remarks
-
My proposal is not the one and only gold standard solution; there can not be one. Details of what a tree looks like always depends on theory. In particular,
- there are opposing views on how to account for determiner + noun (making it an NP, as I did, or a DP, with consequences for their internal structure)
- whether to omit redundant bar levels (as I did),
- how to label the relative clause (CP or S or ...) ,
- where to attach the relative clause (as an adjunct to the NP "the girl" or as an adjunct to the N' "girl"),
- whether the PPs act as complements or as adjuncts to the NPs.
Which solution is deemed correct depends on what theory you are using.
- You really should take a look again into the basics of how phrase structure trees work. For example, having a VP with a P head, as you did in your second tree, makes absolutely no sense. It seems that there are some substantial assumptions about phrase structure trees that are not quite clear to you yet.
You must always make sure that the labels of your (sub) trees are in accordance with what is in the tree: A PP consists of a P and an NP complement, if you have an NP, then this must have an N as its head, and an expression "the brother of ..." is certainly not a VP.
Once you gained a better understanding of how phrase structure trees work, what a phrase consists of an what relations hold between constutuents, it will get far more obivious to you how to assign a sentence a tree structure.
Source: https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/20948/syntax-trees-examples
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