ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Discontinuous-constituent phrase structure grammar

Discontinuous-constituent phrase structure grammar is a special way that we can study how we put words together to make sentences.

Imagine you have a bunch of Legos - you can stack them together to build different things, like a tower or a house. In the same way, we can put words together to build sentences.

But sometimes, the words in the sentence don't stick together like Legos in a tower or a house. Instead, some of the words are separated by another word or words. For example, "The dog that I adopted last month is very friendly." The words "the dog" and "is very friendly" stick together, but "that I adopted last month" is in the middle and separated from the rest.

This is where discontinuous-constituent phrase structure grammar comes in. It's a way to study how we put these separated words together to make sense.

We can break up the sentence into different parts, called constituents. In this case, we have three constituents: "the dog," "that I adopted last month," and "is very friendly".

We can then look at how each of these parts fits into the sentence as a whole. For example, we can see that "that I adopted last month" is a modifier that describes more about the dog. We can also see that "is very friendly" is the main verb that tells us something about the dog.

By studying how these different parts fit together, we can learn more about how we use language and how we understand what people are saying to us. It's like taking apart a toy to see how it works - by breaking down sentences into their constituents, we can understand more about how language works!