Right-branching sentence

Right-branching sentence

In English grammar, a right-branching sentence is a sentence in which the main subject of the sentence is described first, and is followed by a sequence of modifiers that provide additional information about the subject. For example, the following sentence is right-branching.

:"The dog slept on the doorstep of the house in which it lived."

Note that the sentence begins with the subject, followed by a verb, and then the object of the verb. This is then followed by a modifier that more closely defines the object, and this modifier is itself modified by a subsequent modifier.

Right-branching sentences are generally held to be easier to read than other similarly-complex grammatical structures, perhaps because other branching styles require the listener to hold more information in memory to be able to correctly interpret the sentence.

See also

* Branching (linguistics)

References

* cite web
url=http://www.twbookmark.com/books/5/0316014982/chapter_excerpt23774.html
title=Writing tools
author=Roy Peter Clark

* cite web
url=http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~karin/neuroling.html
title=Functional Neuroimaging Studies of Language


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