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The distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. [2] An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an attributive adjective alone generally precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man, whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g. a man proud of his children. [3]
The word dog is the head of big red dog since it determines that the phrase is a noun phrase, not an adjective phrase. Because the adjectives big and red modify this head noun, they are its dependents. [2] Similarly, in the compound noun birdsong, the stem song is the head since it determines
In some cases, particularly with noun and adjective phrases, it is not always clear which dependents are to be classed as complements, and which as adjuncts.Although in principle the head-directionality parameter concerns the order of heads and complements only, considerations of head-initiality and head-finality sometimes take account of the position of the head in the phrase as a whole ...
English adjectives head phrases that typically function as pre-head modifiers of nouns or predicative complements (e.g., those nice folks seem quite capable) while English nouns head phrases that can function as subjects, or objects in verb phrases or preposition phrases (e.g., [Jess] told [my sister] [a story] about [cute animals]).
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 syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase; [1] for example, a phrase whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase. The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. In the following phrases the head-word, or head, is bolded: too slowly — Adverb phrase (AdvP); the head is an adverb
In some languages (Spanish, Welsh, Indonesian, etc.), the postpositive placement of adjectives is the normal syntax, but in English it is largely confined to archaic and poetic uses (e.g., "Once upon a midnight dreary", as opposed to "Once upon a dreary midnight") as well as phrases borrowed from Romance languages or Latin (e.g., heir apparent ...
Although the DP analysis is the dominant view in generative grammar, most other grammar theories reject the idea. For instance, representational phrase structure grammars follow the NP analysis, e.g. Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, and most dependency grammars such as Meaning-Text Theory, Functional Generative Description, and Lexicase Grammar also assume the traditional NP analysis of ...