In linguistics, branching is the general tendency towards a given order of words within sentences and smaller grammatical units within sentences (such as subordinate propositions, prepositional phrases, etc.). Such ordering and nesting of phrases can be represented as a tree where branches can be divided into other minor branches, which may also branch in turn. Linguistics is the scientific study of language, which can be theoretical or applied. ... A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. ... In linguistics, a sentence is a unit of language, characterized in most languages by the presence of a finite verb. ...

Languages typically construct phrases with a head (or nucleus) and zero or more dependents (modifiers). For example, in English a noun phrase can be constructed as follows: In linguistics, the head is the morpheme that determines the category of a compound or the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... In linguistics, a noun phrase is a phrase whose Head is a noun. ...

• noun (e.g. "people")
• article + noun (e.g., "the man")
• numeral + noun (e.g., "ten swallows")
• article + adjective + noun (e.g., "the beautiful trees")
• (article + genitive noun) + noun (e.g., "the woman's eyes")
• article + noun + relative clause (e.g., "the house which the crane demolished")
• etc.

In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun, and the dependents are the article, the adjective, the numeral, the genitive (-'s) noun and the relative clause. Noun or noun substantive is a lexical category which is defined in terms of how its members combine with other grammatical kinds of expressions. ... // An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. ... In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to modify a noun or pronoun (called the adjectives subject, giving more information about what the noun or pronoun refers to. ... A numeral is a symbol or group of symbols that represents a number. ... A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun. ...

There are also verb phrases, prepositional phrases, etc. In every case, the constituents are placed in a given order, which is more or less fixed according to the language in question. Also in some cases, the dependents can in turn be the heads of inner phrases (as in "the black cat's paws", "an awfully messy room", etc.).

Branching is typically ordered. In English, an article can usually only be added to a bare noun by placing it before the noun. An adjective can usually only be added to an article-noun phrase between the article and the noun, whereas a relative clause can only be added after the noun. The direct object of a sentence is usually found after the verb, while the subject comes before the verb.

The rules exemplified above constitute the branching tendency of the language, which can be predominantly left-branching or right-branching.

Left-branching languages, such as Turkish, Japanese, or Tamil tend to place dependents before heads. Adjectives precede nouns, direct objects come before verbs, and there are postpositions. In less formal terminology, this ordering is calledhead-last. Tamil ( ; IPA ) is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamils in India and Sri Lanka, with smaller communities of speakers in many other countries. ... A postposition is a type of adposition, a grammatical particle that expresses some sort of relationship between a noun phrase (its object) and another part of the sentence; an adpositional phrase functions as an adjective or adverb. ...

Right-branching languages, such as Spanish, Arabic and Khmer, tend to place dependents after heads. Adjectives follow nouns, direct objects follow verbs, and adpositions are prepositional. This is also known as head-first order. Arabic ( or just ) is the largest living member of the Semitic language family in terms of speakers. ... Khmer (ភាសាខ្មែរ) is one of the main Austroasiatic languages. ... Look up preposition in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with adposition. ...

For most languages, the main branching tendency is just a tendency and it often shows exceptions. Spanish, for example, while overwhelmingly right-branching, puts numerals before nouns and, in certain cases, objects before verbs. Languages like English and German, though regarded as right-branching because verbs precede direct objects and there are prepositions, place adjectives and numerals before their nouns. Japanese and many other languages of northern and eastern Asia, on the other hand, are practically a model for rigidly left-branching languages. The Mon-Khmer and Austronesian languages of southeast Asia and many African languages come close to rigidly right-branching, with numerals as well as adjectives following their nouns and degree words like "very", "too", "extremely", "quite" following the adjectives they modify. The Mon-Khmer languages are the autochthonous languages of Indo-China. ... The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... Map showing the distribution of African language families and some major African languages. ...

References

• Haspelmath, Martin; Dryer, Matthew S.; Gil, David and Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures; pp . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-925591-1
• Comrie, Bernard; Language universals and linguistic typology : syntax and morphology (2nd edition): published 1989 by Basil Blackwell, Oxford, England. ISBN 0631129715

See also

• Specifier
• Complement (linguistics)
• Adjunct (grammar)
• X-bar theory