Saturday, February 10, 2018

The five phrase types

When we looked at pronouns, we said that they are often
used to replace a noun:

      David loves football. He supports Manchester United.

Here, the personal pronoun he replaces the noun David. But consider:

     The young boy who lives beside us loves football.                         He supports Manchester United.
  

In this case, he replaces the entire sequence the young boy who  lives beside us.This is not a noun – it is a noun phrase . We call
it a noun phrase because its central word – boy – is a noun. More
correctly, then, a pronoun can be used to replace a noun phrase.

There are five phrase types:

                Phrase type                                Examples  
     ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
             
              1 Noun phrase                  the young boy  
                                                            Main word: noun boy  

             2-   Verb phrase                    has been stolen  
                                                             Main word: verb stolen  

             3-   Adjective phrase            very greedy  
                                                            Main word: adjective greedy  

             4-   Adverb phrase               too quickly  
                                                             Main word: adverb quickly  

            5-   Prepositional phrase       after the storm  
                                                            Main word: preposition after  

In a noun phrase, the main word is a noun, in a verb phrase, the main word is a verb and so on. Before looking at each of the five phrase types,a brief note on the word ‘phrase’.

In grammar, a ‘phrase’ can consist of just one word, the main word
alone. For instance, we say that both greedy and very greedy are adjective phrases. Why not simply say that greedy is an adjective? This is because the same rules apply to adjectives and adjective phrases.The same positional rules apply to greedy and to very greedy:

                                            greedy.
                                         
   Children can be                         
                                          
                                           very greedy.
                                  

    
                                    
                                            greedy             
                                                                                 
     Simon was a                                                child.  
                                                                      
                                          very greedy      

Instead of saying each time ‘adjective or adjective phrase’, it is simpler to say ‘adjective phrase’, and thereby include adjectives. So when we talk about phrases, remember that they may consist of just one word.