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For example, in the sentence "The dog bites the man", the man is both the patient and the direct object. By contrast, in the sentence "The man is bitten by the dog", which has the same meaning but different grammatical structure, the man is still the patient, but now stands as the phrase's subject; and the dog is only the agent.
Categories can also pertain to sentence constituents that are larger than a single word (phrases, or sometimes clauses). A phrase often inherits category values from its head word; for example, in the above sentences, the noun phrase the birds inherits plural number from the noun birds.
In short, a sentence with one or more dependent clauses and at least one independent clause is a complex sentence. A sentence with two or more independent clauses plus one or more dependent clauses is called compound-complex or complex-compound. In addition to a subject and a verb, dependent clauses contain a subordinating conjunction or ...
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."
Almost every noun phrase bears at least one thematic relation (the exception are expletives). Thematic relations on a noun are identical in sentences that are paraphrases of one another. Theta roles are syntactic structures reflecting positions in the argument structure of the verb they are associated with. A noun may only bear one theta role.
A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. [1] Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically , and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.
For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing .
For example, the noun phrase kinesiology functions as a pre-head complement in the larger noun phrase a kinesiology student. The noun phrase's status a complement can be made clearer by paraphrasing the noun phrase that contains it: a student of kinesiology , in which of kinesiology is more clearly a complement.