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
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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.
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.
