... theory's overall significance and its general position in syntactic studies. Phrase structures are used in linguistics to act as an almost mathematical formula that has the power to summarise phrase structures in any language, and their syntactic constituents, succinctly and precisely. The constituent parts comprise phrasal categories and lexical categories, the former consisting of noun phrases, verb phrases and prepositional phrases, and the latter consisting of noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, among others. Phrase structure rules, when written 'conventionally', consist of an equalised structure whereby the elements on one side of the arrow are equivalent to the elements on the other side, such as: S -> NP VP NP -> Det N1 N1 -> (AP) N1 (PP)1 The elements on the right-hand side, as is perhaps self-evident, are sub-categories of the elements depicted on the left-hand side of the equation. The major flaw of basic phrase structure rules, however, is perhaps that grammatically sound ...

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