Context-Free Grammars and Constituency Parsing

19.1 Constituency

1. What is syntactic constituency?
   The idea that groups of words can behave as single units (constituents), e.g. noun phrases.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 19, §19.1, p. 426
2. What evidence shows that a sequence like “three parties from Brooklyn” is a constituent?
   The whole sequence appears in the same syntactic environments as other noun phrases (e.g. before a verb: “three parties from Brooklyn arrive”), while its individual words can’t (*from arrive, *the is).
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 19, §19.1, p. 426