Sentences; Parts of Speech and Their Phrases

Chapter 1 discusses the basic structure of sentences and introduces the part-of-speech categories and their related phrases. A sentence comprises a subject, predicate, and optional sentence modifiers. In turn, the subject is always a noun phrase or other nominal phrase or dependent clause and provides nominal meaning (telling who or what), while the predicate is always a verb phrase comprising a verb and its complements and modifiers. Sentence modifiers provide context for the sentence and can appear at the beginning or end, and often between the subject and predicate. Words, and their associated phrases, can be identified with eight “parts of speech”: open classes (we routinely create new ones) of content words (nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs) and closed classes of function words (prepositions, pronouns, determiners, some adverbs, and conjunctions). Members of each lexical category are defined by their form, function, and meaning. Members of all lexical categories (except conjunctions) can form phrases, which commonly comprise a head word and complement(s) and/or modifiers as dependent constituents. Phrases may have the form of one lexical category but perform the function associated with a different lexical category.