Uncovering your intuitions about phrases
Task B - creating sentences (cont.)
Now rearrange the following four words to make as many well-formed sentences
as you can, and then you can compare your versions
with ours:
Our Answer
Phrases
But if all we could manage to do when we use English was to rearrange
sequences of single words into natural possible orders, all of our sentences
would be very short and simple indeed. One of the ways we can express
more complex ideas and sets of relations is to use phrases based on the
major word-classes.
To show this, below we put brackets around the grammatical constituents
of the sentences we discuss and also emboldened what seems to be the head
word (the word to which the other words in the phrases are related, or
act as modifiers) of each of the various constituents in sentences 3 and
4.
Compare:
1. (Quickly) (Mary) (became) (amorous).
2. (Mary) (kissed) (John) (passionately).
with
3. (Very quickly) (the girl) (was becoming) (extremely
amorous).
4. (The beautiful woman) (must have kissed) (the hopeful
man) (very passionately indeed).
Sentence 3 has twice the number of words as sentence 1, but the two sentences
appear to share the same overall structure. Similarly, sentence 4 has
three times the words of sentence 2, but again the two sentences appear
to share the same overall structure. The groups of words which we have
bracketed in sentences 3 and 4, then, are examples of what grammarians
usually call phrases, and we can now see that it is phrases which
combine together in 3 and 4 to make simple sentences. Indeed, it is phrases
which are being combined grammatically in sentences 1 and 2 as well -
it just that they happen to be one-word phrases.
Noun Phrases (NP), Verb Phrases (VP), Adjective Phrases (AdjP) and Adverb
Phrases (AdvP)
Note also that each of the phrases in sentences 3 and 4 have the words
in sentences 1 and 2 as their head words. So sentence 3 consists
of:
ADVERB PHRASE (AdvP) + NOUN
PHRASE (NP) + VERB PHRASE (VP) + ADJECTIVE
PHRASE (AdjP)
And sentence 4 consists of:
NOUN PHRASE (NP) + VERB
PHRASE (VP) + NOUN PHRASE (NP) + ADVERB
PHRASE (AdvP)
Prepositional Phrases
In addition to the above four phrase types (NP,
VP, AdjP, AdvP),
there is one more phrase type, the PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE
(PP), which consists of a preposition with a Noun Phrase as its complement
(or 'completing phrase') e.g. 'in the cupboard', 'up the stairs', 'round
the corner'.
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