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In the second example, the non-restrictive relative clause who have never known your family describes you in the independent clause, You see them standing around you. A noun clause is a dependent clause that functions like a noun. A noun clause may function as the subject of a clause, a predicate nominative, an object or an appositive.
For example, clauses can be questions, [2]: 161 but questions are not propositions. [3] A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a verb. [4] But this too fails, as a clause need not have a subject, as with the imperative, [2]: 170 and, in many theories, an English clause may be verbless.
Noun phrases can be identified by the possibility of pronoun substitution, as is illustrated in the examples below. a. This sentence contains two noun phrases. b. It contains them. a. The subject noun phrase that is present in this sentence is long. b. It is long. a. Noun phrases can be embedded in other noun phrases. b. They can be embedded in ...
A noun such as Fred or a noun phrase such as the book cannot qualify as subject and direct object, respectively, unless they appear in an environment, e.g. a clause, where they are related to each other and/or to an action or state. In this regard, the main verb in a clause is responsible for assigning grammatical relations to the clause ...
An example is land in the phrase land mines given above. Examples of the above types of modifiers, in English, are given below. It was [a nice house]. (adjective modifying a noun, in a noun phrase) [The swiftly flowing waters] carried it away. (adjectival phrase, in this case a participial phrase, modifying a noun in a noun phrase)
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before and/or after the head noun. adjective (red house vs house red) determiner (this house vs ...
In the clause the dog bit the man, for example, the dog belongs to the syntactic category of noun phrase and performs the syntactic function of subject. The distinction between category and function is at the heart of a terminological issue surrounding the word determiner : various grammars have used the word to describe a category, a function ...