As an architect he was very talented
In these two sentences, the words very happy form a phrase. So we have an adjective phrase. Just as with nouns and noun phrases, we will say that whenever an adjective appears it is inside an adjective phrase, although it may be the only element in the adjective phrase. So we can write phrase structure rules showing the structure of simple adjective phrases:
AdjP → (Adv) Adj
Now that we’ve seen adjective phrases, we need to go back and modify our rule for noun phrases. We said that an NP → (Detv) (Adj) N, but there are several problems with that rule. Firstly, we’ve said wherever an adjective appears it’s inside an AdjP, so our rule should have an Adj P in it, not just an adjective. In fact, we need an AdjP because NPs can be more complicated than the ones we’ve seen so far. We can say things in English like: a very talented architect.
Here, clearly, we have an AdjP very talented inside the NP. But we also need to expand our NP rule further, because rather than just a single AdjP, an NP can contain several AdjPs: the rather famous very talented architect.So we must change our rule for an NP to:
NP → (Detv) (AdjP)* N
The asterisk is used to indicate that there can be more than one of a constituent.
Adverb phrase. Just as we have adjective phrases, we also have adverb phrases, to take account of things like very quickly, rather carefully and so on. An adverb phrase normally consists of an adverb possibly preceded by a degree adverb, e.g.:
Very interesting friendly indeed
Really good-looking always hungry
rather annoying incredibly miserable
So there is a small set of very simple phrase structure rules, which can account for many, many English sentences. Obviously, to account for all sentences of English, we would have to develop more complex rules.
In each of these alternative forms, a combination of words from the original sentence which one might intuitively put together in a single unit also occurs together as a unit, and this can be taken as evidence that they are in fact constituents. Using square brackets to group the words in constituents together, the constituent structure of The shaft of a passing cab brushed against his shoulder may be represented as in (4) (‘S’ stands for ‘sentence’.)
(4)[S [NP The [N shaft]] [P of NP[ a [Adj passing] [N cab]]VP [V brushed] [AdvP against][NP [P his] [N shoulder]]
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Tests for phrases
Consider the following sentence:
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte. [59]
All speakers of English would agree that in this sentence, some of the words go together with each other more closely than others. For example, the words the rich brown atmosphere seem to go together more closely than, say atmosphere was peculiar. Likewise in the mansion seems to go together as a unit (often referred to as a constituent), more than the mansion of.
For our native language we could rely on intuition to decide about phrases. But that is not going to work if we have to describe a language which we don’t know very well.
What sorts of formal tests can we find to decide whether something is a phrase or not?
Substitution test
One of the simplest tests for phrases is what is called the substitution test. If we can substitute a set of words with a single other word, without changing the overall meaning, then we can say that those words form a phrase.
For example, looking back at the earlier sentence, we can substitute various of the phrases for single words:
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte
It was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte that it was the rich brown atmosphere.
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar there.
We can see from this that the words the rich brown atmosphere form a phrase, as do the words back rooms, the mansion and in the mansion.
Substitution also can be seen with what is called anaphora, where a single item substitutes for an earlier mentioned item, in question and answer sequences or in long sentences. For example, we could have a question and answer sequence:
"There's no money in that," he said. ‘Yes, he went bankrupt," replied Nicholas.[59, p.66]
In the second sentence here, the word bankrupt has replaced no money, showing us that no money must be a phrase.
While substitution usually works on the basis of a single word, it is also possible to substitute using the phrase do so or so do. We can see this sort of substitution in:
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Old Jolyon's hand trembled in its thin lavender glove, and so did his son’s.[59, p.45]
So the words hand trembled in our original sentence form a phrase.
Cleft test
As well as substitution, another test we can use to see if something is a phrase is what is called the clefting. Cleft sentences have the form
It is/was/will be ____ that/who ____
The important thing for a cleft test is to take the original sentence, and try putting it into this frame, without changing it in any way except for taking one part of it out and putting it in the first slot, and putting the rest of the sentence in the second slot. For example:
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte
It was the rich brown atmosphere that was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte
Old Jolyon's hand trembled in its thin lavender glove.[59.p.23]
It was Old Jolyon's hand that trembled in its thin lavender glove.
When applying the cleft test, it is important not to change anything about the sentence, except for taking one part out and putting it between it is/was/will be and that/who.
If it is possible to cleft a sentence, then the part of the sentence which occurs between it is/was/will be and that/who forms a phrase. Note that if it is possible to cleft a group of words, then that group of words forms a phrase; but just because you can’t cleft something, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a phrase. For example, we know that in our original sentence the words the rich brown atmosphere form a phrase, but we can’t cleft it:
It was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte that the rich brown atmosphere.
Movement tests
Phrases often behave as units for various movement operations, with the entire phrase moving together. For example, we could move the phrase on that shelf in our original sentence:
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte.
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To back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte was peculiar the rich brown atmosphere.
A specific case of movement is the formation of a passive sentences. As we can see the set of words the key and the words in the lock in our sentence must each be a phrase because each set of words moves together under passivization:
Old Jolyon turned the key softly in the lock[59,p.58] (active sentence)
The key was softly turned in the lock[59] (passive sentence)
Noting the nesting of constituents within constituents in this sentence, e.g. the NP the lock is a constituent of the PP in the lock which is a constituent of the VP turned in the lock. At the beginning of this section it was noted that the two aspects of syntactic structure, relational structure and constituent structure, are ‘distinct yet interrelated’, and it is possible now to see how this is the case. For example, a VP was described as being composed of a verb and the following NP, but it could alternatively be characterized as involving the verb and its direct object. Similarly, a PP is composed of a preposition and its object. NPs, on the other hand, involve modifiers, and accordingly the relation between the and lock could be described as one of modifier–modified.
Lexical categories
In the discussion of the constituents of sentences, reference has been made to nouns and noun phrases, verbs and verb phrases, and prepositions and prepositional phrases. Nouns, verbs and prepositions are traditionally referred to as ‘parts of speech’ or ‘word classes’; in contemporary linguistics they are termed lexical categories. The most important lexical categories are noun, verb, adjective, adverb and adposition, which subsumes prepositions and postpositions. In traditional grammar, lexical categories are given notional definitions, i.e. they are characterized in terms of their semantic content [9,pp.25-67].
For example, noun is defined as ‘the name of a person, place or thing’, verb is defined as an ‘action word’, and adjective is defined as ‘a word expressing a property or attribute’. In modern linguistics, however, they are defined morphosyntactically in terms of their grammatical properties.
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Nouns may be classified in a number of ways. There is a fundamental contrast between nouns that refer uniquely to particular entities or individuals and those that do not; the best example of the first kind of noun is a proper name, e.g. Sam, Elizabeth, Paris or London, and nouns of this type are referred to as proper nouns.
Nouns which do not refer to unique individuals or entities are called common nouns, e.g. dog, table, fish, car, pencil, water. One of the important differences between proper and common nouns in a language like English is that common nouns normally take an article, while proper nouns do not, e.g. : The boy left versus *The Sam left (cf. *Boy left versus Sam left). Common nouns may be divided into mass nouns and count nouns. Count nouns, as the name implies, denote countable entities, e.g. seven chairs, six pencils, three dogs, many cars. Mass nouns, on the other hand, are not readily countable in their primary senses, e.g. *two waters, *four butters, *six snows. In order to make them countable, it is necessary to add what is sometimes called a ‘measure word’, which delimits a specific amount of the substance, e.g. two glasses/bottles/drops of water, four pats/sticks of butter, six shovelfuls of snow. Measure words can be used with count nouns only when they are plural, e.g. *six boxes of pencil versus six boxes of pencils, *two cups of peanut versus three jars of peanuts. Pronouns are closely related to nouns, as they both function as NPs. Pronouns are traditionally characterized as ‘substitutes’ for nouns or as ‘standing for’ nouns, e.g. John went to the store, and he bought some milk, in which he substitutes or stands for John in the second clause. This, however, is true only of third-person pronouns like he, she, it, or they; it is not true of first-person pronouns like I or second-person pronouns like you. First- and second-person pronouns refer to or index the speaker and addressee in a speech event and do not replace or stand for a noun.
Verbs can likewise be categorized along a number of dimensions, such as:
person, number( in Modern English there are but few form indicating them in the synthetic forms of the verb. These are (1).the 3rd person singular Present Indefinite Indicative; (2) the Future Indefinite tense; (3) the suppletive forms of the verb to be for different persons of singular and plural), aspect (perfect and progressive), voice (active and passive), mood (indicative, imperative and subjunctive) and tense (there are four groups of tenses: Indefinite, Continuous, Perfect and Perfect Continuous; each of these forms includes four tenses: Present, Past, Future and Futute-in-the-Past. Thus there are 16 tenses in English.)
Conclusions to Part I
1 .Syntax is the branch of grammar dealing with the ways in which words, with or without appropriate inflections, are arranged to show connections of meaning within the sentence.
2. The main object of syntax is sentence construction.
3. One of the most obvious yet important ways in which languages differ is the order of the main elements in a sentence.
4. The basic word order in English clauses is subject–verb–object, articles precede the noun they modify, and auxiliary verbs precede the main verb. These are English-specific syntactic rules.
5. The connection between the words in a sentence is realized through the changes in their forms and these changes in the form of the words to indicate their function in the sentence are called ‘inflections’, and the study of the formation of words and how they may change their form is called morphology.
6. Syntax investigates simple sentences, as well as their combinations called complex sentences.
7. A central part of the description of what speakers do is characterizing the grammatical (or well-formed) sentences of a language and distinguishing them from ungrammatical or (ill-formed) sentences.
8. Two interrelated aspects of syntax: relational structure and constituent structure.
9. Words organization into phrases. Types of phrases.
10. In order to check if word combination is a phrase, the tests for phrases are to be done.
11. Lexical categories. Their semantic content.
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