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The distinguishing characteristic of an attributive adjective phrase is that it appears inside the noun phrase that it modifies. [2] An interesting trait of these phrases in English is that an attributive adjective alone generally precedes the noun, e.g. a proud man, whereas a head-initial or head-medial adjective phrase follows its noun, e.g. a man proud of his children. [3]
The remaining part of the phrase is called the prepositional complement, or sometimes the "object" of the preposition. In English and many other Indo-European languages it takes the form of a noun phrase, such as a noun, pronoun, or gerund, possibly with one or more modifiers. A prepositional phrase can function as an adjective or adverb.
The World Atlas of Language Structures treats a word as an adposition if it takes a noun phrase as a complement and indicates the grammatical or semantic relationship of that phrase to the verb in the containing clause. [3] Some examples of the use of English prepositions are given below. In each case, the prepositional phrase appears in ...
A relative clause is a dependent clause that modifies a noun or noun phrase in the independent clause. In other words, the relative clause functions similar to an adjective. Let him who has been deceived complain. (Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote) You, who have never known your family, see them standing around you.
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 ...
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."
Words that function as compound adjectives may modify a noun or a noun phrase.Take the English examples heavy metal detector and heavy-metal detector.The former example contains only the bare adjective heavy to describe a device that is properly written as metal detector; the latter example contains the phrase heavy-metal, which is a compound noun that is ordinarily rendered as heavy metal ...
English adjectives can take clauses, preposition phrases, and noun phrases as complements. Clause complements in adjective phrases can be either finite or nonfinite. Finite clause complements can be declarative (e.g., very pleased that I had bought his book) or interrogative (e.g., not sure whether I want to keep reading).