English grammar: Noun Phrases

Language awareness to improve productive skills
luna_edith@yahoo.com

 In talking about writing, or in analyzing written
texts, it is useful to have a vocabulary to describe
syntax, or the grammatical structure of
utterances. Different philosophies of language and
different approaches to the description of natural
languages produce different grammars. The
approach taken here might be described as
structural grammar--as opposed, for example, to
"traditional" grammar or "transformational"
grammar.

 Structural grammar, as its name
suggests, assumes that linguistic
entities are "constructions"--that is,
larger entities made up by combining
smaller entities in certain ways. The
smallest unit of a natural language,
according to the structural grammarian,
is the phoneme.

 Phonemes are combined to make morphemes.
 Morphemes are combined to make words, and
words are combined to make constructions.
 Rules govern the ways constructions may be formed
in any particular natural language. Not just any
combination of words counts as a construction: for
example, an have with greenly would not count
as a "well-formed" construction in English. Speakers
of a language "know" the rules that govern the
combining of words into constructions, in the sense
that they "intuitively" use these rules.

 The teacher was sitting next to the door
 Two girls arrived at the party
 My grandmother is a kind lady
Basic Noun Phrases

The young teacher
The History teacher
Two little funny girls
Several sleeping children
A wounded soldier

 My grandmother there
 Two girls dressed in white
 Several men bringing boxes
 That man with the dog
 The policeman that was silent

Anna Khitrova finds a diary on the body of
Tatiana. She also finds a card for a
restaurant. Anna thus sets out to track down
the girl's family so that she can find a home
for Tatiana’s girl.

 Anna Khitrova, a midwife at a London
hospital, finds a Russian-language diary
on the body of Tatiana, a fourteen-year-
old girl who dies in childbirth. She also
finds a card for the Trans-Siberian
restaurant, which is owned by Semyon,
a boss in the Russian Mafia or vory v
zakone ("thieves in law"). Anna thus
sets out to track down the girl's family so
that she can find a home for the dead

 A young girl falls in love with a mysterious stranger,
shipwrecked in the bay near her village.
 A man meets a beautiful but penniless girl on a trip to
Cuba.
 A bored middle-aged adulterer picks up a young
married woman without expecting the great love that
will develop.
 A student rents an apartment that looks onto the
meticulously kept garden of the strange Dr
Rappaccini and his beautiful daughter.

 Noun Phrases: Heart of statements
(Headword), modifiers (pre- and post-).
 Determiners: pre-, post- and compound ones
 Noun Phrases positions.
 Order of modifiers
 P- groups. Form classes as object of the
preposition.
 S-groups. Subordinators of the “who” type.
 Composition
 Descriptions of people, places, objects, events
 Narrations including descriptions

 Quickly describe a book you read/ film you
saw/play…(around 50 words)
 Focus on noun phrases and improve them to give
a more accurate picture of the element described
(100 wds)
 Check your first and second versions to aim at
accuracy
 Do not send it. The procedure will be explained
next class
 We are going to work anonymously, cooperatively
and constructively

THANK YOU
VERY MUCH!

English grammar: Noun Phrases

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