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Noun phrase
A noun phrase or nominal phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase which has a noun (or indefinite pronoun) as its head word, or which performs the same grammatical function as such a phrase.[1] Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type. Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as the complements of prepositions. Noun phrases can be embedded inside each other; for instance, the noun phrase some of his constituents contains the shorter noun phrase his constituents. In some modern theories of grammar, noun phrases with determiners are analyzed as having the determiner rather than the noun as their head; they are then referred to as determiner phrases.
Noun phrase b. Milk is good. c. They spoke about corruption. The words in bold are called phrases since they appear in the syntactic positions where multiple-word phrases (i.e. traditional phrases) can appear. This practice takes the constellation to be primitive rather than the words themselves. The word he, for instance, functions as a pronoun, but within the sentence it also functions as a noun phrase. The phrase structure grammars of the Chomskyan tradition (government and binding theory and the minimalist program) are primary examples of theories that apply this understanding of phrases. Other grammars, for instance dependency grammars, are likely to reject this approach to phrases, since they take the words themselves to be primitive. For them, phrases must contain two or more words.
Syntactic function
Noun phrases typically bear argument functions.[3] That is, the syntactic functions that they fulfill are those of the arguments of the main clause predicate, particularly those of subject, object and predicative expression. They also function as arguments in such constructs as participial phrases and prepositional phrases. For example: For us the news is a concern. - the news is the subject argument Have you heard the news? - the news is the object argument That is the news. - the news is the predicative expression following the copula is They are talking about the news. - the news is the argument in the prepositional phrase about the news The man reading the news is very tall. - the news is the object argument in the participial phrase reading the news Sometimes a noun phrase can also function as an adjunct of the main clause predicate, thus taking on an adverbial function, e.g. Most days I read the newspaper.
Noun phrase | big | N | house | big | N | houses | | | | | big | N | house | big | N | houses
2. Dependency trees, first using the traditional NP approach, then using the DP approach: house / / / the big / houses / big | | | | | the \ house / big big (null) \ houses /
The following trees represent a more complex phrase. For simplicity, only dependency-based trees are given.[5] The first tree is based on the traditional assumption that nouns, rather than determiners, are the heads of phrases.
The head noun picture has the four dependents the, old, of Fred, and that I found in the drawer. The tree shows how the lighter dependents appear as pre-dependents (preceding their head) and the heavier ones as post-dependents (following their head). The second tree assumes the DP hypothesis, namely that determiners rather than nouns serve as phrase heads.
Noun phrase
The determiner the is now depicted as the head of the entire phrase, thus making the phrase a determiner phrase. Note that there is still a noun phrase present (old picture of Fred that I found in the drawer) but this phrase is below the determiner.
Footnotes
[1] For definitions and discussions of the noun phrase that point to the presence of a head noun, see for instance Crystal (1997:264), Lockwood (2002:3), and Radford (2004: 14, 348). [2] For direct examples of approaches that obscure the distinction between nouns and pronouns on the one hand and noun phrases on the other, see for instance Matthews (1981:160f.) and (Lockwood (2002:3). [3] Concerning how noun phrases function, see for instance Stockwell (1977:55ff.). [4] For discussion and criticism of the DP analysis of noun phrases, see Matthews (2007:12ff.). [5] For a dependency grammar analysis of noun phrases similar to the one represented by the trees here, see for instance Starosta (1988:219ff.). For an example of a relatively "flat" analysis of NP structure like the one produced here, but in a phrase structure grammar, see Culicover and Jackendoff (2005:140).
References
Crystal, D. 1997. A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, fourth edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Culicover, P. and R. Jackendoff. 2005. Simpler syntax. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lockwood, D. 2002. Syntactic analysis and description: A constructional approach. London: Continuum. Matthews, P. 1981. Syntax. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Matthews, P. 2007. Syntactic relations: A critical survey. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Radford, A. 2004. English syntax: An introduction. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Starosta, S. 1988. The case for lexicase. London: Pinter Publishers. Stockwell, P. 1977. Foundations of syntactic theory Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.
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