Back Constituent Catalan Složková gramatika Czech Konstituente German Constituyente sintáctico Spanish سازه (زبانشناسی) Persian Wurdgroep Frisian Բաղադրություն Armenian Konstituen (linguistik) ID 構成素 Japanese Elementum constitutivum (syntaxis) Latin
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that function as a single unit within a hierarchical structure. The constituent structure of sentences is identified using tests for constituents.[1] These tests apply to a portion of a sentence, and the results provide evidence about the constituent structure of the sentence. Many constituents are phrases. A phrase is a sequence of one or more words (in some theories two or more) built around a head lexical item and working as a unit within a sentence. A word sequence is shown to be a phrase/constituent if it exhibits one or more of the behaviors discussed below. The analysis of constituent structure is associated mainly with phrase structure grammars, although dependency grammars also allow sentence structure to be broken down into constituent parts.
- ^ Osborne (2018) provides a detailed and comprehensive discussion of tests for constituents, having surveyed dozens of textbooks on the topic. Osborne's article is available here: Tests for constituents: What they really reveal about the nature of syntactic structure Archived 2018-11-27 at the Wayback Machine. See also Osborne (2019: 2–6, 73–94).