Noun phrase

In grammatical theory, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase whose head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers. The modifiers may be:

• determiners: articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, that), numerals (two, five, etc.), possessives (my, their, etc.), and quantifiers (some, many, etc.); in English, determiners are usually placed before the noun;
• adjectives (the red ball); or
• complements, in the form of an adpositional phrase (such as: the man with a black hat), or a relative clause (the books that I bought yesterday).

In English, for some purposes, noun phrases can be treated as single grammatical units. This is most noticeable in the syntax of the English genitive case. In a phrase such as The king of Sparta's wife, the possessive clitic "-'s" is not added to the king who actually has the wife, but instead to Sparta, as the end of the whole phrase. The clitic modifies the entire phrase the king of Sparta.

Grammatical function

A noun phrase can play the role of a verb argument (such as the subject, the object) or the role of the predicate. A prototypical case is the case when the noun phrase cooccurs with the copula and another noun phrase. The possibility for a noun phrase to play the role of subject and predicate leads to the constructions of syllogisms.

References

• Giorgi, A. - Longobardi, G. (1991) The syntax of noun phrases, Cambridge University Press, England.
• Moro, A. (1997) The raising of predicates. Predicative noun phrases and the theory of clause structure, Cambridge University Press, England.