This main thrust of this blog post is to question the way that constituent structure (and constituent structure tests) are often presented in introductory linguistics and syntax books, and suggests that the overemphasis on trees often obscures the bigger project of discovering the rules/principles making up a speakers’ (unconscious, of course) ‘knowledge’ of the grammatical system of their language. Such books often misleadingly suggest that there is a single constituent structure for an unambiguous sentence. Aside from the fact that any theory with movement doesn’t embrace this, the emphasis on there being ‘a’ constituent structure for an unambiguous sentence is actually not tenable in any theory (due to coordination facts). Indeed, the overemphasis on trees is so deeply rooted in the field that the notion that there could be ‘discontinuous constituents’ via infixation in the syntax is almost never contemplated (though see some work in Categorial Grammar) forcing instead a view of more than one level.