In linguistics, branching refers to the shape of the parse trees that represent the structure of sentences. Parse trees that grow downward as speech and processing proceeds left to right are right-branching, whereas parse trees that grow upwards as speech and processing proceeds left to right are left-branching. Taking a top-down perspective, parse trees that grow down and to the right are right-branching, and parse trees that grow down and to the left are left-branching.
