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phrases formed by the determiner the with an adjective, as in the homeless, the English (these are plural phrases referring to homeless people or English people in general); phrases with a pronoun rather than a noun as the head (see below); phrases consisting just of a possessive; infinitive and gerund phrases, in certain positions;
Prepositional phrases are also placed beneath the word they modify; the preposition goes on a slanted line and the slanted line leads to a horizontal line on which the object of the preposition is placed. These basic diagramming conventions are augmented for other types of sentence structures, e.g. for coordination and subordinate clauses.
In the prepositional phrase apart from Jill, for example, the preposition apart requires that the complement include the preposition from. In the prepositional phrase since before the war, however, the preposition since does not require the preposition before and could have instead been something else, such as since after the war. [14]: 635–643
A gerund is a verb form that appears in positions that are usually reserved for nouns. In English, a gerund has the same form as a progressive active participle and so ends in -ing. Gerunds typically appear as subject or object noun phrases or even as the object of a preposition:
A gerund may function syntactically as the head of a verb phrase: for instance, the gerund of a transitive verb may take a direct object in the accusative case, e.g., ad discernendum vocis verbi figuras 'for discerning figures of speech', hominem investigando opera dabo 'I will devote effort to investigating the man'.
The gerund takes the same form (ending in -ing) as the present participle, but is used as a noun (or rather the verb phrase introduced by the gerund is used as a noun phrase). [23] Many uses of gerunds are thus similar to noun uses of the infinitive. Uses of gerunds and gerund phrases are illustrated below: As subject or predicative expression:
Prepositions in this section may also take other kinds of complements in addition to noun phrase complements. Prepositions marked with an asterisk can be used transitively or intransitively; that is, they can take noun phrase complements (e.g., he was in the house) or not (e.g., he was in).
Verb phrases generally are divided among two types: finite, of which the head of the phrase is a finite verb; and nonfinite, where the head is a nonfinite verb, such as an infinitive, participle or gerund. Phrase structure grammars acknowledge both types, but dependency grammars treat the subject as just another verbal dependent, and they do ...