Here is a sentence from Scottish Gaelic which would be translated as “The boy saw the black dog.”

One very obvious difference between the structure of this Gaelic sentence and its English counterpart is the fact that the verb comes first in the sentence. Another noticeable feature is that, when an adjective is used, it goes after the noun and not before it. We can represent these structural observations in a labeled and bracketed diagram.

The diagram makes it clear that this Gaelic sentence is organized with a V NP NP structure, which is rather different from the NP V NP structure we found in the English sentence analyzed earlier.

It is not, of course, the aim of this type of analysis that we should be able to draw complicated-looking diagrams in order to impress our friends. The aim is to make explicit, via the diagram, what we believe to be the structure of grammatical sentences in the language. It also enables us to describe clearly how English sentences are put together as combinations of phrases which, in turn, are combinations of words. We can then look at similar descriptions of sentences in other languages such as Gaelic, Japanese or Spanish and see clearly what structural differences exist. At a very practical level, it may help us understand why a Spanish learner of English produces phrases like *the drink red (instead of the red drink), using a structural organization of constituents that is possible in Spanish, but not in English.