Chapter VII: Phrases I
In language, words form units that work as wholes in relation to other units and are organized hierarchically
in different levels. These levels are: the word level, the phrase level, the clause level, the sentence level,
and the discourse level.
The phase level occupies a middle position in the structure of language between the word and the clause. A
phrase is a string of words forming a syntactic unit which typically contains more than one word. Phrases
are named after the most important word they contain, called the head of the phrase. If the head is a noun,
for example, the phrase is called a noun phrase, if the head is a verb the phrase is called a verb phrase, and
so on. All the four major word classes and one minor word class (i.e. preposition) form phrasal
constructions, so there are five types of phrase: the noun phrase, which includes the pronoun phrase as a
minor type, the verb phrase, the adjective phrase, the adverbial phrase, and the prepositional phrase.
Noun and pronoun phrase
A noun phrase (NP) is a phrase with a noun as head, called the head noun. The minimal form of a noun
phrase consists of a single noun, but its typical structure comprises three parts:
The head noun, which is the core of the NP and decides on verb agreement;
The premodification, which contains all the words appearing in the NP before the head noun
including the determiner;
The postmodification, which comprises everything appearing in the NP after the head noun.
In an NP the premodification minimally consists of the determiner. Besides the determiner, it typically
comprises one or more adjectives, or an adjective and a noun with an adjectival function (“ my new sports
car”).
The main types of postmodification are prepositional phrases (“ the house on the hill”), certain kinds of
finite clause (“the man that I love”), and certain kinds of non-finite clause (“ the lady waiting outside”).
Adverbs and adjectives are sometimes used as postmodifiers.
A noun phrase is constructed around the head noun and its structure is highly varied and complex. This is
why it is sometimes difficult to establish where a noun phrase begins and ends. One way of identifying the
string of words belonging to a noun phrase is to replace a given string with a pronoun. If the resulting
sentence is grammatically acceptable, though it may be semantically opaque, it means that we have
correctly identified the entire NP.
Of all syntactic units the English noun phrase allows the greatest structural variation. Distinctive NP
patterns characterize the style of different registers. For instance, a distinguishing feature of scientific and
technical writing is the relative high incidence of complex, lexically dense NPs, where the head noun is
premodified by adjectives and nouns.
Another specialized register characterized by a distinctive NP pattern is legal English, which shows a clear
preference for postmodification.
A pronoun phrase (pro-NP) is a phrase with a pronoun as head. Pronoun phrases are usually analysed as a
sub-class of the NP. In the vast majority of cases they consist of a single pronoun, their structure being
limited to a small number of other possibilities, for example a relative clause such as “those who left their
country” or expressions such as “Poor me!”, “You there!”, “he himself”, “we all”, “almost everyone”.
