Tham khảo luận văn - đề án 'research report: "the structure of the noun phrase in english"', luận văn - báo cáo phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | ĐẠI HỌC VINH TẠP CHÍ KHQA HỌC TẬP XXXVI số 1B-2007 THE STRUCTURE OF ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES NGUYEN THI VAN LAM a Abstract. Noun phrases play an important role in the construction of a sentence. The author argues that without knowledge of noun phrases in English learners could not produce comprehensible sentences. This article therefore aims to discuss the structure of noun phrases both basic and complex. Basic noun phrases can be pronouns numerals or head nouns with different determiners while complex ones include premodification head noun and post-modification. 1. INTRODUCTION Among the five different types of phrases in English namely noun phrases verb phrases adjective phrases adverb phrases and prepositional phrases noun phrases are the most common playing various syntactic functions in the sentence and clause structure subject object and complement of various kinds apposition and attribute. They are used to refer to things that people want to talk about people objects concepts processes and all kind of entities. However the problem arises here How can we construct noun phrases both basic and complex ones This article is to deal with the structure of basic and complex noun phrases. 2. BASIC NOUN PHRASES Structurally speaking in the first place basic noun phrases consist of pronouns numerals or nouns with articles indefinite definite or zero or nouns with other closed-system items that occur before the noun head including pre-determiners predet determiners det. and post-determiners post-det. . The underlined parts of the following sentences are good examples of basic noun phrases I stayed at home during all the last few days. Pronoun zero article noun pre-de. det. post-det. noun Some people dislike 13 . det. noun numeral . Pronouns and Numerals Many linguists argue that pronouns are a special class of noun. According to Quirk Greenbaum Leech and Svartvik 1972 the implication of the name as pronouns is that they replace nouns or rather whole noun phrases since .
