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For example, in the sentence "Jack ate the cheese", the cheese is the patient. In certain languages, the patient is declined for case or otherwise marked to indicate its grammatical role. In Japanese , for instance, the patient is typically affixed with the particle o ( hiragana を) when used with active transitive verbs, and the particle ga ...
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]).
Interjections are another word class, but these are not described here as they do not form part of the clause and sentence structure of the language. [2] Linguists generally accept nine English word classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, determiners, and exclamations.
Though the prototypical prepositional phrase consists of a noun phrase complement following a preposition, prepositions can take a wider variety of complements than just noun phrases. [ 14 ] : 603–606 English prepositions can also take clauses , adjective phrases , adverb phrases , and other prepositional phrases as complements, though they ...
The lexical categories that a given grammar assumes will likely vary from this list. Certainly numerous subcategories can be acknowledged. For instance, one can view pronouns as a subtype of noun, and verbs can be divided into finite verbs and non-finite verbs (e.g. gerund, infinitive, participle, etc.).
Noun adjuncts (nouns qualifying another noun) also generally come before the nouns they modify: in a phrase like book club, the adjunct (modifier) book comes before the head (modified noun) club. By contrast, prepositional phrases, adverbs of location, etc., as well as relative clauses, come after the nouns they modify: the elephant in the room ...
[1]: 54 Adjectives as modifiers in a noun phrase do not need to agree in number with a head noun (e.g., old book, old books) while determiners do (e.g., this book, these books). [ 1 ] : 56 Morphologically, adjectives often inflect for grade (e.g., big , bigger , biggest ), while few determiners do.
A prepositional phrase should not be confused with the particle that comprises a phrasal verb. Phrasal verbs often consist of a verb and a particle, whereby the particle is mistakenly interpreted to be a preposition, e.g. a. He turned on the light. - on is a particle, not a preposition b. He turned it on. - Shifting manifests on as a particle a.