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Many common suffixes form nouns from other nouns or from other types of words, such as -age (shrinkage), -hood (sisterhood), and so on, [3] though many nouns are base forms containing no such suffix (cat, grass, France). Nouns are also created by converting verbs and adjectives, as with the words talk and reading (a boring talk, the assigned ...
Though the prototypical preposition is a single word that precedes a noun phrase complement and expresses spatial relations, the category of preposition includes more than this limited notion (see English prepositions § History of the concept in English). Prepositions can be categorized according to whether the preposition takes a complement ...
Prepositions in this section may also take other kinds of complements in addition to noun phrase complements. Prepositions marked with an asterisk can be used transitively or intransitively; that is, they can take noun phrase complements (e.g., he was in the house) or not (e.g., he was in).
Another pre-head modifier of nouns is determiner phrases. For example, the determiner phrase two in the noun phrase these two images functions as a pre-head modifier. While determiners that occur before nouns tend to function as determinatives, noun phrases can contain only one determinative, so additional determiner phrases must have some ...
With exceptions such as usage in The New York Times, the names of sports teams are usually treated as plurals even if the form of the name is singular. [5] The difference occurs for all nouns of multitude, both general terms such as team and company and proper nouns (for example where a place name is used to refer to a sports team). For instance,
The determiners form a closed lexical category in English. [2] The syntactic role characteristically performed by determiners is known as the determinative function (see § Terminology). [3] A determinative combines with a noun (or, more formally, a nominal; see English nouns § Internal structure) to form a noun phrase (NP).
Most English compound nouns that consist of more than two words can be constructed recursively by combining two words at a time. Combining "science" and "fiction", and then combining the resulting compound with "writer", for example, can construct the compound "science fiction writer" or "science-fiction writer".
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."