Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
Understanding English Variation
Week 5 – Introduction to Syntax – Word and Phrase
Classes
Word Classes
(1) The boy killed the giant
Example (1) is an example of an English sentence. Of course there are many, many
thousands of possible sentences in English. What all sentences have in common is
that they consist of words. As there are five words in (1) we could rewrite this as:
(2) S  word + word+ word + word + word
What (2) implies however, is that all the words are of the same type and can therefore
go in any order. Of course this is not the case, as the examples in (3), show.
(3)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
*giant the the boy killed
the giant killed the boy
*killed giant the boy the
*the killed the boy giant
In (3) (a), (c) and (d) are ungrammatical. The order of the words does not make
sense. There fore these sentences are marked with an asterisk (*). The sentence in (b)
is a grammatical sentence in English. The meaning is different from the original
sentence in (1) but the order of the words makes sense. If we compare (1) and (3b),
reprinted below in (4), we can see that the words ‘giant’ and ‘boy’ have swapped
places.
(4)
(a) The boy killed the giant
(b) The giant killed the boy
Because ‘giant’ and ‘boy’ are interchangeable, we say that they are both examples of
the same word class, that word class in NOUN. Therefore, we can rewrite (2) as
(5) S  The NOUN killed the NOUN
Importantly, it is not only the nouns ‘giant’ and ‘boy’ which could fill the slots
marked NOUN, but any English noun.
Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
(6)
(a) The soldier killed the giant
(b) The fox killed the rabbit
(c) The cabbage killed the giant
Importantly, (6c) is a grammatical sentence of English. Although the meaning is a bit
strange, the order of the words makes sense. Imagine a fantasy story where cabbages
are animate, for example, or if the cabbage had been poisoned.
Nouns
Nouns are words which name something. We distinguish between common nouns
and proper nouns. Proper nouns are names of specific people (Lucy), places (Paris) or
times (Tuesday). We normally capitalise the initial letter of proper nouns in writing.
Common nouns are nouns that name things. We have seen some common nouns in
(6) above (soldier, fox, rabbit, cabbage).
Determiners
Determiners are words which limit the range of things a noun can refer to. In (1) the
determiners are ‘the’ and ‘the’. The most common determiners in English are the
articles:
Indefinite article: a, an
Definite article: the
Other determiners exist and can be used instead of, but not as well as, an article.
Some other determiners are ‘that’, ‘those’, ‘another’, and ‘these’. You can see that we
can substitute any of these determiners for those in (1)
(7)
(a) Another boy killed that giant
(b) A boy killed another giant
This allows us to rewrite (2) and (5) (using DET as the short form of determiner)
(8) S DET NOUN killed DET NOUN
Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
Verbs
We are left with a single word in (8) for which we have not established a word class.
The word ‘killed’ belongs to the class of verbs. Verbs are words which describe an
action or state. The examples in (9) substitute different words for killed.
(9)
(a) The boy loved the giant
(b) The boy kissed the giant
(c) The boy kicked the giant.
This allows us to rewrite (8) as
(10) S DET NOUN VERB DET NOUN
Tree Diagrams
We can also rewrite (10) using a tree diagram. A tree diagram shows what the
relationship between constituents is. For example, the bigger constituents are higher
up the tree. (11) shows a simple tree diagram for the sentence in (1)
(11)
S
DET
NOUN
VERB
The
boy
killed
DETERMINER
the
NOUN
giant
Phrase classes
So far we have only considered word classes, such as noun, verb and determiner.
However, we need to add another level to our tree in (11) to show which words are
more closely related.
The Noun Phrase
If we look at the original sentence in (1), we can see that we can substitute proper
nouns or pronouns for certain word classes.
Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
Pronouns
Pronouns are words that can take the place of a noun. In English pronouns are words
like he, she, it. What we can see is that pronouns take the place of not only the noun
but also the determiner. We say that the determiner and the noun form a unit, this unit
is called the noun phrase.
(12)
(a) He killed him
(b) She killed it
(c) They killed her
We can therefore rewrite (10) as
(13) S  (DET NOUN) VERB (DET NOUN)
where the brackets indicate that the determiner and noun form a unit. We can add this
level of noun phrase to our tree as follows.
S
(14)
NP
DET
The
VERB
NOUN
boy
NP
DETERMINER
killed
the
NOUN
giant
Noun phrases do not just have to contain a determiner and a noun. As we have seen,
the may contain just a noun (15), or just a pronoun (16).
(15)
S
NP
VERB
NOUN
Henry
NP
NOUN
killed
Bob
Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
(16)
S
NP
VERB
PRO
He
NP
PRO
killed
her
Subject and Predicate
Subject
In all our examples so far, there has been a noun phrase at the beginning of the
sentence. This first noun phrase is the subject of the sentence. The subject is
introduced first and has something said about it. In the following two examples, the
subject is highlighted. The term subject tells us about the function of the particular
noun phrase.
(17)
(a) The boy killed the giant
(b) The giant killed the boy
Predicate
The rest of the sentence that is not the subject is the predicate. The predicate is the
part of the sentence which says something about the subject. In the following
sentences the predicate is highlighted. Again the predicate is a term for the function,
rather than the form, of the highlighted part. The predicator is the name for the verb
in the predicate. The predicator is underlined.
(18)
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
The boy killed the giant
The girl skipped
Ian Duncan Smith lost the vote of confidence
The dog chased his tail
Rachael-Anne Knight, 2003, University of Surrey – Roehampton
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Understanding English Variation, Week 5
The Verb Phrase
We said earlier that nouns and determiners form a unit called the noun phrase. The
verb phrase is also a single unit. In all the examples in (18) the predicate consists of a
verb phrase. The verb phrase may be just a single verb as in “the girl skipped” or may
be more complicated as in the other examples.
We can tell that the verb phrase is a complete unit as it can be replaced by does/did
too. In (19) you can see that “did too” replaces the whole of the verb phrase.
(19)
(a) The boy killed the giant, the girl did too
(b) The girl skipped, the boy did too
(c) Ian Duncan Smith lost the vote of confidence, Betsy did too
(d) The dog chased his tail, the cat did too
We can include the verb phrase in our earlier trees
(20)
S
NP
DET
VP
N
V
NP
DET
The
boy
killed
the
N
giant
In this sentence the second noun phrase acts as direct object of the verb killed. So a
functional analysis would be as follows:
The
boy
Subject (S)
killed
predicator (P)
the
giant
direct object (dO)