User:Alassius/temp2

A full sentence
For more complex utterances, different theories of grammar assign different X-bar theory elements to different phrase types in different ways. Consider the sentence He studies linguistics at the university. A transformational grammar theory might parse this sentence as the following diagram shows:

IP                                           IP     /  \                                          /  \ NP   I'                                      NP    I'    |     | \                                     |     | \ N    I   --- VP                              N     I   --- VP   |     |       |                               |     |       | He studies    V'                             He    -s       V'                 |                                             | |                                            |            ---                                   ---           /           \                                 /           \          V'            PP                             V'             PP         /  \            |                            /  \             | V   NP          P'                          V    NP           P'             |         /   \                         |    |          /   \ N'      P     NP                     study  N'        P     NP             |        |    /  \                           |         |    /  \ N      at  DetP  N'                         N        at  DetP  N'             |            |    |                          |             |    | linguistics     Det'  N                     linguistics       Det'  N                          |    |                                        |    | the  university                              the   university

Surface structure                               Deep structure

The "IP" is an inflection phrase, whose head is the inflection of the verb. The verb study is said to have "moved" from V to I.

IP   /  \ NP   I'  |     | \ N    I   --- VP  |     |       | He  does      V'                | |          ---          /           \        V'             PP       /  \             | V   NP           P'      |    |          /   \ study N'        P     NP           |         |    /  \ N       at  DetP  N'           |             |    | linguistics      Det'  N                         |    | the  university

Its specifier is the noun phrase (NP) which acts as the subject of the sentence. The complement of the IP is the predicate of the sentence, a verb phrase (VP). There is no word in the sentence which explicitly acts as the head of the inflectional phrase, but this slot is usually considered to contain the unspoken "present tense" implied by the tense marker on the verb "studies".

A head-driven phrase structure grammar might parse this sentence differently:



(This diagram uses the proper overbar notation.)

In this theory, the sentences is modeled as a verb phrase (VP). The noun phrase (NP) that is the subject of the sentence is located in specifier of the verb phrase. The predicate parses the same way in both theories.