Right-branching sentence

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In English grammar, a right-branching sentence is a sentence in which the main subject of the sentence is described first, and is followed by a sequence of modifiers that provide additional information about the subject. For example, the following sentence is right-branching.

The dog slept on the doorstep of the house that it lived in.

Note that the sentence begins with the subject, followed by a verb, and then the object of the verb. This is then followed by a modifier that more closely defines the object, and this modifier is itself modified by a subsequent modifier.

Right-branching sentences are generally held to be easier to read than other similarly-complex grammatical structures, perhaps because other branching styles require the listener to hold more information in memory to be able to correctly interpret the sentence.