nominally, particularly with indefinite pronouns like ‘something’, ‘anything’, ‘nothing’, and ‘everything’.

While adjectives almost always have some relationship to a noun, whether in the NP or the VP, adverbs modify many other parts of speech; classically, adverb phrases (AdvP) are understood as ‘modifying’ verbs in verb phrases, where they appear as adjuncts, but they can also modify adjective phrases, prepositional phrases, other adverb phrases, and both main and subordinate clauses as well.

We continue to call of the remaining objections a prepositional phrase because of cannot be moved like true particles:

determinative.

Fred and Netherlands are instances of proper nouns. A proper noun is a type of noun that refers to a specific person, place, or thing (Evelyn, Cairo, Saturday, etc.) Common nouns refer to classes of things (cat, trash, stone, etc.) rather than particular ones. All nouns that are not proper are common.

*Margaret slept her bed.

Because such verbs have two objects they are called ditransitive verbs,

A tree consists of nodes. A node has a label, for example NP for noun phrase, VP for verb phrase, and so on.

Take a moment to study this diagram. We will refine it later with additional details, but it’s important that you recognize what information it’s trying to communicate.

group of words that functions together as an entity.

Borrowing terminology from genealogical trees, the nodes below another node are sometimes called the children of that node. A node that has children is a parent node. Just as with people, parent nodes can themselves be children of other parents.

A clause is a constituent consisting of two parts: a subject and a predicate.

can, could, will, would, shall, should, may, might, or must.

If we are going to do more than simply accept the traditional parts of speech uncritically, we need to establish some sort of theory of word categories, a set of principles that will let us decide where the traditional categories work and where they need revision.

Indeed, language is often said to be a combinatorial system, where a small number of basic building blocks combine and recombine in different patterns.

Her slept the bed until 10 o’clock.

Grammar books like those you probably used in high school would dismiss this sentence as ungrammatical, telling you that ain’t is not a word, that me mustn’t be used in the subject of a sentence, and that you can’t use two negatives together.

It also takes you through the logic that leads us to say that one way of analyzing language is more accurate or useful than others.

In the upper-right of each page on this site (including this one), you should see several icons: a left-arrow [ < ], an eye, and a word bubble.