left-branching

[ left-bran-ching, -brahn- ]

adjective

, Linguistics.

1. (of a grammatical construction) characterized by greater structural complexity in the position preceding the head, as the phrase my brother's friend's house; having most of the constituents on the left in a tree diagram ( right-branching ).

Word History and Origins

Origin of left-branching¹

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

The full English menu, though, offers them a few left-branching options.

From Literature

Left-branching trees are a hazard of headline writing.

From Literature

My favorite explanation of the difference in difficulty between flat, right-branching, and left-branching trees comes from Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks, who takes a flat clause with three branches, each containing a short right-branching clause, and recasts it as a single left-branching noun phrase: “When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle’s on a poodle and the poodle’s eating noodles, they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle.”

From Literature

But if the branch is bushy, or if one branch is packed inside another, a left-branching structure can give the reader a headache.

From Literature

As much of a battle as left-branching structures can be, they are nowhere near as muddled as center-embedded trees, those in which a phrase is jammed into the middle of a larger phrase rather than fastened to its left or right edge.

From Literature