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A sentence may also be broken down by functional parts: subject, object, adverbial, verb (predicator). [6] The subject is the owner of an action, the verb represents the action, the object represents the recipient of the action, and the adverbial qualifies the action. The various parts can be phrases rather than individual words.
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects, complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases).
Coordinate structures are created when two or more elements are connected by a coordinator. These structures can involve words, phrases, or clauses. For example, "apples and oranges" is a coordinate structure consisting of two noun phrases, while "She likes apples and he likes oranges" is a coordinate structure consisting of two clauses.
Syntax refers to the linguistic structure above the word level (for example, how sentences are formed) – though without taking into account intonation, which is the domain of phonology. Morphology, by contrast, refers to the structure at and below the word level (for example, how compound words are formed), but above the level of individual ...
The predicational sentence in (5) ascribes the property to the referent noun phrase whereas the equative sentence basically says that the first and second noun phrase share the same referent. It is difficult to distinguish between a predicative and equative sentence in English as both use a similar construction and both require the copular verb ...
While sentence (14) is well-formed in the adult grammar, sentence (15) is not, as indicated by the asterisk (*). The source of the ill-formedness is that the verb hug is a transitive verb and so must have a direct object, namely something or someone who receives the action of the verb. Sentence (15) is missing the receiver of hug.
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What this means is that for phrase structure rules to be applicable at all, one has to pursue a constituency-based understanding of sentence structure. The constituency relation is a one-to-one-or-more correspondence. For every word in a sentence, there is at least one node in the syntactic structure that corresponds to that word.