Consider the eight words in the sentence:
(3)The shaft of a passing cab brushed against his shoulde,[59, p.64]
What units are these words organized into? Intuitively, it seems clear that the article the or a goes with or forms a unit with the noun following it. Is there any kind of evidence beyond a native speaker's intuitions that this is the case? If the article forms a unit with the noun that follows it, we would expect that in an alternative form of the same sentence the two would have to be found together and could not be split up.
Thus, these two aspects of syntactic structure are always present in a sentence, and when one or the other is emphasized, the sentence is being described from one of the two perspectives. It will be seen later that different grammatical phenomena seem to be more easily analyzed from one perspective rather than the other.
1.3 Phrases as the basic element of syntax
In the passive version of the sentence (3) The shaft was brushed against his shoulder by a passing cab the unit the shaft serves as subject, and the unit the passing cab is the object of the preposition by. The constituent composed of a noun and an article is called a noun phrase [NP], e.g. by the teacher; NPs can be very complex. Here is a list of some examples of NP:
the girl beautiful weather
this boy those sunny days
a dog stupid question
that large bicycle nice try
women the Pacific Ocean
elderly men brilliant student
David this year
Queensland judgment day
The verb plus the NP following it form a unit as well, as shown by a sentence like A cab rolled out of blackness, and into blackness disappeared[59]. The constituent composed of a verb plus following NP is called a verb phrase [VP]. As with NPs, VPs can be quite complex. In our discourse, we have various different verb phrase structures, like the ones we can see in the following sentences.
He stood quite still, listening with all his might. [59, p.34]
He ran forward and back, felt his heart clutched by a sickening fear.[59, p.23]
He had just put together a neat break of twenty-three,--failing at a 'Jenny.'[59, p.23]
The murky blackness of the fog was but faintly broken by the lamps of the 'Red Pottle,' and no shape of mortal man or thing was in sight.[59, p.35]
George turned on him, looking really formidable, with a sort of savage gloom on his big face.[59, p.65]
Bumley Tomm was rather a poor thing, though he had been so successful.[59, p.53]
The expression he had used was 'a free hand in the terms of this correspondence.'[59, p.55]
So our verb phrase can have just a verb, or a verb followed by a PP, or a verb followed by an NP, or a verb followed by an NP and a PP, or a verb followed by an NP and more than one PP, or a verb followed by two NPs or a verb followed by two NPs and a PP, or a verb followed by two NPs and more than one PP.
While these structures are more and more complex, we can actually write them very simply with a single phrase structure rule:
The rich brown atmosphere was peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte. [59]
All speakers of English would agree that in this sentence, some of the words go together with each other more closely than others. For example, the words the rich brown atmosphere seem to go together more closely than, say atmosphere was peculiar. Likewise in the mansion seems to go together as a unit (often referred to as a constituent), more than the mansion of.
For our native language we could rely on intuition to decide about phrases. But that is not going to work if we have to describe a language which we don't know very well.
What sorts of formal tests can we find to decide whether something is a phrase or not?
"There's no money in that," he said. `Yes, he went bankrupt," replied Nicholas.[59, p.66]
In the second sentence here, the word bankrupt has replaced no money, showing us that no money must be a phrase.
While substitution usually works on the basis of a single word, it is also possible to substitute using the phrase do so or so do. We can see this sort of substitution in:
Old Jolyon's hand trembled in its thin lavender glove, and so did his son's.[59, p.45]
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