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The typical pre-head modifiers of nouns are adjective phrases, but the typical pre-head modifiers of verbs are adverb phrases. Nouns can head phrases containing determinatives and predeterminatives while verbs cannot. [13] [57] The following table summarizes some of these characteristics:
Adjective phrase (AP), adverb phrase (AdvP), adposition phrase (PP), noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), etc. In terms of phrase structure rules , phrasal categories can occur to the left of the arrow while lexical categories cannot, e.g. NP → D N. Traditionally, a phrasal category should consist of two or more words, although conventions ...
An adjective (abbreviated adj.) is a word that describes or defines a noun or noun phrase.Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives are considered one of the main parts of speech of the English language, although historically they were classed together with nouns. [1]
For example, because martial is a postpositive adjective in the phrase court-martial, the plural is courts-martial, the suffix being attached to the noun rather than the adjective. This pattern holds for most postpositive adjectives, with the few exceptions reflecting overriding linguistic processes such as rebracketing .
With the adjective as a modifier in a noun phrase, the adjective and the noun typically receive equal stress (a black bird), but in a compound, the adjective typically takes primary word stress (a blackbird). Only a small set of English adjectives function in this way: [37] The colour words black, blue, brown, green, grey, red, and white
An example of a verbal adjective with verb-like features is the word wearing in the sentence The man wearing a hat is my father (it behaves as a verb in taking an object, a hat, although the resulting phrase wearing a hat functions like an attributive adjective in modifying man). An example of a deverbal adjective is the word interesting in ...
An English preposition can never follow its noun, so if we can change verb - P - noun to verb - noun - P, then P cannot be a preposition and must be particle. [h] But even with a particle verb, shifting the particle is not always possible, for example if it is followed by a pronoun instead of a noun, or if there is a fixed collocation. A second ...
"verb phrase"/"verbal phrase"—Headed by a verb, many verbal phrases are multi-word but some are one-word: a verb (which could be a compound verb). " phrasal verb "—A sub-type of verb phrase, which has a Grammatical particle before or after the verb, often having a more or less idiomatic meaning.