Word.ws English Dictionary

X-bar

X-bar noun: a phrase, or, equivalently, a node in a syntax tree, which consists either of: (1) an adjunct and another X-bar phrase, (2) a head, X, and an optional complement, or (3) a conjunction sandwiched between two other X-bars. The X is a "pro-letter" which can be substituted by letters such as N for noun, V for verb, P for preposition, I for inflectional, etc.

Noun

X-bar

  1. (X-bar theory) A phrase, or, equivalently, a node in a syntax tree, which consists either of: (1) an adjunct and another X-bar phrase, (2) a head, X, and an optional complement, or (3) a conjunction sandwiched between two other X-bars. The X is a "pro-letter" which can be substituted by letters such as N for noun, V for verb, P for preposition, I for inflectional, etc.
    • For example, the fact that give must occur as the leftmost constituent of the V-bar containing it follows from two conditions. The first is a putatively universal linearisation (i.e. word-order) principle proposed by Stowell (1981, p. 68) which we might call the PERIPHERY PRINCIPLE: this can be...1988, Andrew Radford, chapter 7, in Transformational grammar: a first course, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page 350

Origin of X-bar

Pronunciation of its text representation: a letter X with overbar (X̄).

Words formed from X-bar

Phrases with X-bar

Questions about X-bar

What does X-bar mean?
X-bar means a phrase, or, equivalently, a node in a syntax tree, which consists either of: (1) an adjunct and another X-bar phrase, (2) a head, X, and an optional complement, or (3) a conjunction sandwiched between two other X-bars. The X is a "pro-letter" which can be substituted by letters such as N for noun, V for verb, P for preposition, I for inflectional, etc.
What part of speech is X-bar?
X-bar is a noun.

Words near X-bar in the dictionary

  1. X-ALD
  2. x-axes
  3. x-axis
  4. x-band
  5. x-bands
  6. X-bar
  7. X-bar theoretic
  8. X-bar theory
  9. X-bar-theoretic
  10. X-box
  11. X-by-wire

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: X-bar (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “X-bar.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/x-bar. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.