A Morphosyntactic Approach to English Phrase Structure Rules

This paper focuses on defining English phrases, targeting most concern on phrase structure rules and examining how they manifest in morphological realizations. Focusing on three key assumptions that posit that 1. phrases are obligatorily headed, 2. morphology reflects syntactic structure, and 3. phrasal heads govern the internal distribution of the phrase, the study tests their validity against linguistic data. Through examples ranging from noun phrase complexity and verbal transitivity to clause-level concord and valency, the analysis demonstrates how phrase structure rules are morphologically realized and syntactically constrained. While traditional grammar often frames such rules as categorical, this paper shows they frequently exhibit gradient behavior and contextual flexibility. The discussion draws on cases of head omission, word-class overlapping, and syntactic ambiguity to argue for a morphosyntactically grounded approach.

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