Electrophysiological Evidence for Sentence Comprehension - Wings

Figure 4. The layered structure of the clause
The layered structure of the clause defines relations between the main constituents of the
sentence. The variety of possible structures is given in the ‘syntactic inventory’ as
‘syntactic templates’. Generally, they are of the form shown on Figure 5.
Figure 5. The constituent projection of a sentence
Some elements of a sentence might not be attached to anything in the constituent
projection (see Figure 6). These elements modify a sentence or its parts and constitute
qualitatively different grammatical categories. They are called operators and include
grammatical categories such as tense or aspect, negation or illocutionary force. Operators
modify different elements of the sentence; aspect modifies the nucleus, negation can
modify nucleus, core or a clause, tense modifies the clause, etc. Operators are represented
on a separate projection. Figure 6 shows a sentence in Croatian with both constituent and
operator projection.
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