Noun Phrases

Nouns in English are traditionally described as naming “persons, places, things, and ideas. Pronouns are subcategory of nouns. Noun phrases are formed by a noun or pronoun and any modifiers, complements, or determiners including adjectives, determiners, prepositional phrases, noun clauses, and verbal phrases. A noun phrase most commonly functions as a subject, object, or complement.
Examples:
• My coach is happy.
• I like the cars over there.
• The man who lives there is my uncle.

Noun and noun phrases perform ten grammatical functions in the English language. The ten functions are:
1. Subject.
2. Subject complement.
3. Direct object.
4. Object complement.
5. Indirect object.
6. Prepositional complement.
7. Noun phrase modifier.
8. Determinative.
9. Appositive.
10. Adverbial.

From a functional point of view, the noun phrase has four major function components, occurring in a fixed order:
• The determinative, that constituent which determines the reference in its linguistic or situational context.
• Premodification, which comprises all the modifying or describing constituents before the head, other than the determiners.

• The head, around which the other constituents cluster.

• Post modification, those which comprise all the modifying constituents placed after the head.


Structures of noun phrase:
The structure of this noun phrase contains three sections:
1. Noun phrase: pre-modifiers + noun
a. White house; here white is a pre-modifier and house is a noun.

2. Noun phrase: noun + post-modifiers. (the most common post-modifier is prepositional phrases)
a. The boy in the store; here in the store is the post-modifier.

3. Noun phrase: pre-modifier + noun + post-modifier
a. The children in the garden; here the is the pre-modifier, children is the noun, in the garden is the post-modifier.