3 Noting that a Japanese sentence typically consists of a sequence of case marked NPs and adjuncts, followed by a main verb at the end (or what would be called 'matrix verb' in linguistics), we seek to compress each of the major chunks in the sentence, leaving untouched the matrix verb, as its removal often leaves the sentence unintelligible.
starting with the leftmost BS in a major constituent, 3 Example 3 could be broken into BSs: / Mushuku -no / John -ga / takai / kuruma -wo / kat-ta /.