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English Syntax 7
English Syntax 7
English Syntax 7
For example, a book is just a noun or a verb out of context, but once we place
it in a sentence – Books are expensive in college- it becomes an NP (Noun Phrase),
with a higher value than that of a noun. Most people, however, identify a phrase
with a group of words – Most old books are cheap- but we do not necessary require
the accompanying words to consider the subject an NP since syntax sees a phrase
as a constituent of a sentence, with functions and relations with other phrases
within that sentence.
Here are the most common syntactic constituents or units (phrases), universal
to all languages, and the syntactic functions they perform within sentences:
▢ object complement - I consider the Lexus the best car in the market.
This is the only phrase that is exocentric (the core is not the word that names
it; (all the others are endocentric).