A police officer found the puppy.
Your neighbour found the puppy.
This black cat found the puppy.
He found the puppy.
A family of expressions that can substitute for one another without loss of grammaticality is called a syntactic category.
The child, a police officer, and so on belong to the syntactic category noun phrase (NP), one of several syntactic categories in English and every other language in the world. Noun phrases may function as a subject or as various object in a sentence, and they contain some form of a noun (common nouns such as boy, proper nouns such as John, or pronouns such as he ). Since he is a single word, you may question our calling it a phase, but technically a syntatic phrase can consist of one or more words. In fact an NP can even include a verbal complex as shown by :
Romeo, who was a montague, loved juliet who was a capulet.
The NP subject of this sentence is romeo, who was a montague, and the object, also an NP, is juliet who was a capulet.
Part of the syntactic component of a grammar is the specification of the syntactic categories in the language, since this constitutes part of speaker's knowledge. That is, speakers of English know that items (a), (b), (e), (f), (g), and (i) in (1) are noun phrases even if they have never heard the term before.
(1)
- a bird
- the red banjo
- have a nice day
- with a balloon
- the woman who was laughing
- it
- johnwent
- that the earth is round
Yuo can test this claim by inserting each expression into the context : 'who discovered ____________ ?' and ' ________________ was seen by everyone'.
Only those sentences in which NP's are inserted are grammatical, because only NP's can function as subjects and objects.
There are other syntactic categories. The expression found the puppy is a verb phrase (VP). Verb phrases always contain a verb (V), which may be followed by other categories, such as a noun phrase or prepositional phrase (PP). This shows that one syntactic category may contain other syntactic categories. In (2), the verb phrases are those that can complete the sentence ' The child ___________
(2)
- saw a clown
- a bird
- slept
- smart
- is smart
- found the cake
- found the cake in the cupboard
- realised that the earth was round
Inserting (a), (c), (e), (f), (g), and (h) will produce grammatical sentences whereas the insertion of (b) or (d) would result in an ungrammatical string. Thus, (a), (c), (e), (f), (g) and (h) are verb phrases.
Other syntactiv categories are sentence (S), determiner (Det), adjective (Adj), noun ( N), pronoun (Pro), preposition (P), prepositional phrase (PP), adverb (Adv), auxiliary verb (Aux), and verb (V). Some of these syntactic categories have traditionally been called 'parts of speech'. All languages have such syntactic categories ; in fact, categories such as noun, verb, pronoun, and noun phrase are universally found in the grammars of all hummen languages. Speakers know the syntactic categories of their language, even if they do not know the techincal terms.
