A Full Sentence
For more complex utterances, different theories of grammar assign X-bar theory elements to phrase types in different ways. Consider the sentence He studies linguistics at the university. A transformational grammar theory might parse this sentence as the following diagram shows:
The "IP" is an inflectional phrase. Its specifier is the noun phrase (NP) which acts as the subject of the sentence. The complement of the IP is the predicate of the sentence, a verb phrase (VP). There is no word in the sentence which explicitly acts as the head of the inflectional phrase, but this slot is usually considered to contain the unspoken "present tense" implied by the tense marker on the verb "studies".
A head-driven phrase structure grammar might parse this sentence differently. In this theory, the sentence is modeled as a verb phrase (VP). The noun phrase (NP) that is the subject of the sentence is located in the specifier of the verb phrase. The predicate parses the same way in both theories.
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