Why So Many Nodes?

This paper provides an analysis of the representation of various grammatical phenomena in both constituency structure and dependency structure (hereafter c-structure and d-structure), including agreement, case marking, and word order in transitive sentences, as well as three theoretical constructs, and the interface between the form of a sentence and its meaning. There is a crucial structural relationship for all of these phenomena in both constituency grammar and dependency grammar, but only the version used in dependency grammar is fully reliable. This insight evokes the following question: Why do linguists working with constituency grammars think that so many nodes are necessary? Upon examination, the extra nodes succeed only in confusing our understanding of syntactic phenomena.