User:Lesly423/sandbox

n grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a key word that identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase; this is known as the head-word, or the head. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase;[1] for example, a phrase whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase. The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head.

In the following phrases the head-word, or head, is bolded:

too slowly — Adverb phrase (AdvP); the head is an adverb very happy — Adjective phrase (AP); the head is an adjective the massive dinosaur — Noun phrase (NP); the head is a noun (but see below for the determiner phrase analysis) at lunch — Preposition phrase (PP); the head is a preposition watch TV — Verb phrase (VP); the head is a verb The above five examples are the most common of phrase types; but, by the logic of heads and dependents, others can be routinely produced. For instance, the subordinator phrase:

before that happened — Subordinator phrase (SP); the head is a subordinating conjunction—it subordinates the independent clause By linguistic analysis this is a group of words that qualifies as a phrase, and the head-word gives its syntactic name, "subordinator", to the grammatical category of the entire phrase. But this phrase, "before that happened", is more commonly classified in other grammars, including traditional English grammars, as a subordinate clause (or dependent clause); and it is then labelled not as a phrase, but as a clause.

Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having a head, but some non-headed phrases are acknowledged. A phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric, and phrases with heads are endocentric.

Functional categories[modifier le wikicode | modifier] Some modern theories of syntax introduce certain functional categories in which the head of a phrase is some functional word or item, which may even be covert, that is, it may be a theoretical construct that need not appear explicitly in the sentence.

For example, in some theories, a phrase such as the man is taken to have the determiner the as its head, rather than the noun man – it is then classed as a determiner phrase (DP), rather than a noun phrase (NP). When a noun is used in a sentence without an explicit determiner, a null (covert) determiner may be posited. For full discussion, see Determiner phrase.

Another type is the inflectional phrase, where (for example) a finite verb phrase is taken to be the complement of a functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to inflect – for agreement with its subject (which is the specifier of INFL), for tense and aspect, etc. If these factors are treated separately, then more specific categories may be considered: tense phrase (TP), where the verb phrase is the complement of an abstract "tense" element; aspect phrase; agreement phrase and so on.

Further examples of such proposed categories include topic phrase and focus phrase, which are assumed to be headed by elements that encode the need for a constituent of the sentence to be marked as the topic or as the focus. See the Generative approaches section of the latter article for details.

Phrase trees[modifier le wikicode | modifier]