Noun phrase

Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as complements of prepositions.

Noun phrases can be identified by the possibility of pronoun substitution, as is illustrated in the examples below.

A string of words that can be replaced by a single pronoun without rendering the sentence grammatically unacceptable is a noun phrase.

Head-final languages (e.g. Japanese and Turkish) are more likely to place all modifiers before the head noun.

In the original X-bar theory, the two respective types of entity are called noun phrase (NP) and N-bar (N, N′).

(In some accounts that take this approach, the constituent lacking the determiner – that called N-bar above – may be referred to as a noun phrase.)

It has been the preferred analysis of noun phrases in the minimalist program from its start (since the early 1990s), though the arguments in its favor tend to be theory-internal.

[5] Dependency grammars, for instance, almost all assume the traditional NP analysis of noun phrases.

For illustrations of different analyses of noun phrases depending on whether the DP hypothesis is rejected or accepted, see the next section.

The representation of noun phrases using parse trees depends on the basic approach to syntactic structure adopted.

The representation also depends on whether the noun or the determiner is taken to be the head of the phrase (see the discussion of the DP hypothesis in the previous section).

[6] The first tree is based on the traditional assumption that nouns, rather than determiners, are the heads of phrases.

The second tree assumes the DP hypothesis, namely that determiners serve as phrase heads, rather than nouns.

An early conception of the noun phrase can be found in First work in English by Alexander Murison.