Abstract
The words of the sentences of many, if not all, natural languages are grouped into phrases, and it is this phrasing, called constituent structure, to which virtually all grammatical processes pay attention, rather than simply the sequences of words in the sentences. The set of word sequences that a grammar creates is called its weak generative capacity, and the set of phrasings a grammar generates is called its strong generative capacity. Sentence comprehension and meaning are determined by constituent structure. There is no direct evidence for constituent structure in the sentences that people hear, and hence its principles are assumed to be innate and ideally universal.
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