... justify the claim that "the true status of constituents and categories is that of theoretical constructs which must therefore be justified on empirical grounds", we must analyse and define the various important terms in turn. A constituent is defined by "A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics", as being "a basic term in grammatical analysis for a linguistic unit which is a functional component of a larger construction." As you can see a sentence can be broken down into constituents. These would be a verb phrase or a noun phrase, just to name a couple of examples. Constituents can be further broken down into simpler constituents. As such a noun phrase can be divided into the constituents a noun and a determiner. The breaking down of a sentence into its constituents is known as constituent analysis. Constituent analysis can be continued until there are no further constituents. The constituent structure of ...

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