, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers.
Noun phrases normally consist of a head noun, which is optionally modified ("premodified" If the modifier is placed before the noun; "postmodified" if the modifier is placed after the noun). Possible modifiers include:
- determiners: articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, that), numerals (two, five, etc.), possessives (my, their, etc.), and quantifiers (some, many, etc.). In English, determiners are usually placed before the noun;
- adjectives (the red ball); or
- complements, in the form of a prepositional phrase (such as: the student of physics), or a That-clause (the claim that the earth is round);
- modifiers; pre-modifiers if placed before the noun and usually either as nouns (the university student) or adjectives (the beautiful lady), or post-modifiers if placed after the noun. A postmodifier may be either a prepositional phrase (the man with long hair) or a relative clause (the house where I live). The difference between modifiers and complements is that complements complete the meaning of the noun; complements are necessary, whereas modifiers are optional because they just give additional information about the noun.
Noun phrases can make use of an apposition structure. This means that the elements in the noun phrase are not in a head-modifier relationship, but in a relation of equality. An example of this is I, Caesar, declare ..., where "Caesar" and "I" do not modify each other.
The head of a noun phrase can be implied, as in "The Bold and the Beautiful" or Robin Hood's "rob from the rich and give to the poor"; an implied noun phrase is most commonly used as a generic plural referring to human beings. Another example of noun phrase with implied head is I choose the cheaper of the two.
That noun phrases can be headed by elements other than nouns—for instance, pronouns (They came) or determiners (I'll take these)—has given rise to the postulation of a determiner phrase instead of a noun phrase. The English language is not as permissive as some other languages, with regard to possible heads of noun phrases. German, for instance, allows adjectives as heads of noun phrases, as in Gib mir die Alten for Give me the olds (i.e. old ones).
source : wikipedia
how about my opinion? what its noun phrase? logically, noun phrases have many variety of words. take your head stay cool, and let i give you an suggestion. hehe :)
"THIS topics IS EASY, not difficult to learn but it will be complicated if you do not take your soda and some friedfries (then you can offer me and we stay enjoy working and searching together)."
I THINK.....
noun phrases is
A word group that includes a noun and its modifiers. The noun can be preceded by determiners (such as the, a, her) and followed by complements. Often abbreviated as NP.
Examples and Observations:
- "The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors."
(James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955)
- "McSorley's bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes."
(Joseph Mitchell, "The Old House at Home," 1940)
- "The wells and water table had been polluted by chemical pesticides and fertilizers that leached into the earth and were washed by rain into the creeks, where the stunned fish were scavenged by the ospreys."
(Peter Matthiessen, Men's Lives, 1986)
- A Georgia woman was jailed briefly after a run-in with courthouse security over her refusal to remove a religious head scarf.
- "The men in the class--there were a few older students, veterans--listened with good-natured interest, and the girls gazed at the instructor with rosy-faced, shy affection."
(Bernard Malamud, A New Life, 1961)
- "Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club."
(Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 1940)
THEORY BASED BY REFERENCE, INTERNET,BOOKS,ETC.
The discussion of the choice of language noted that a single concept is often signaled by a variety of words, each word possessing slightly different connotations. We can indicate that people are less than content by saying they are angry , irate , incensed , perturbed , upset , furious , or mad. The broader our vocabulary, the greater our options and the more precisely we can convey our meaning.
And yet no matter how wide our vocabulary may be, a single word is often insufficient. A single word, by itself, can appear somewhat vague, no matter how specific that word might seem. The term “dog” may be specific compared to “mammal,” but it is general compared to “collie.” And “collie” is general compared to “Lassie.” Then again, many different dogs played Lassie!
Suppose you want to indicate a female person across the room. If you don’t know her name, what do you say?
That girl.
If there were more than one, this alone would be too general. It lacks specificity.
The girl in the blue Hawaiian shirt…
The taller of the two cheerleaders by the water cooler…
When a single term will not supply the reference we need, we add terms to focus or limit a more general term. Instead of referring to drugs in a discussion, we might refer to hallucinogenic drugs. We might distinguish between hard drugs and prescription drugs . In so doing we modify the notion of a drug to describe the specific one, or ones, we have in mind. (Then again, at times we are forced to use many words when we cannot recall the one that will really do, as when we refer to that funny device doctors pump up on your arm to measure blood pressure instead of a sphygmomanometer ).
This section examines how we construct full and specific references using noun phrases. An ability to recognize complete noun phrases is essential to reading ideas rather than words. A knowledge of the various possibilities for constructing extended noun pharses is essential for crafting precise and specific references. Nouns
To begin our discussion, we must first establish the notion of a noun.
English teachers commonly identify nouns by their content. They describe nouns as words that "identify people, places, or things," as well as feelings or ideas—words like salesman , farm , balcony , bicycle , and trust. If you can usually put the word a or the before a word, it’s a noun. If you can make the word plural or singular, it's a noun. But don't worry...all that is needed at the moment is a sense of what a noun might be.
What if a single noun isn't specific enough for our purposes? How then do we modify a noun to construct a more specific reference?
English places modifiers before a noun. Here we indicate the noun that is at the center of a noun phrase by an asterisk (*) and modifiers by arrows pointed toward the noun they modify.
white house
*
large man
*
Modification is a somewhat technical term in linguistics. It does not mean to change something, as when we "modify" a car or dress. To modify means to limit, restrict, characterize, or otherwise focus meaning. We use this meaning throughout the discussion here.
Modifiers before the noun are called pre-modifiers. All of the pre-modifiers that are present and the noun together form a noun phrase .
NOUN PHRASE
pre-modifiers noun
*
By contrast, languages such as Spanish and French place modifiers after the noun
casa blanca white house
* 
homme grand big man
*
The most common pre-modifiers are adjectives, such as red , long , hot . Other types of words often play this same role. Not only articles
the water
*
but also verbs
running water
*
and possessive pronouns
her thoughts
*
Premodifiers limit the reference in a wide variety of ways.
Order: second, last
Location: kitchen, westerly
Source or Origin: Canadian
Color: red, dark
Smell: acrid, scented
Material: metal, oak
Size: large, 5-inch
Weight: heavy
Luster: shiny, dull
A number of pre-modifiers must appear first if they appear at all.
Specification: a, the, every
Designation: this, that, those, these
Ownership/Possessive: my, your, its, their, Mary’s
Number: one, many
These words typically signal the beginning of a noun phrase.
Some noun phrases are short:
the table
® *
Some are long:
the second shiny red Swedish touring sedan
*
a large smelly red Irish setter
*
my carved green Venetian glass salad bowl
*
the three old Democratic legislators
*
Notice that each construction would function as a single unit within a sentence. (We offer a test for this below,)
The noun phrase is the most common unit in English sentences. That prevalence can be seen in the following excerpt from an example from the section on the choice of language:
The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic rout
Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged. The stock market’s summer swoon turned into a dramatic rout * *
Monday as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged.
* *
To appreciate the rich possibilities of pre-modifiers, you have only to see how much you can expand a premodifier in a noun phrase:
the book
the history book
the American history book
the illustrated American history book
the recent illustrated American history book
the recent controversial illustrated American history book
the recent controversial illustrated leather bound American history book
Noun Post-Modifiers
We were all taught about pre -modifiers: adjectives appearing before a noun in school. Teachers rarely speak as much about adding words after the initial reference. Just as we find pre -modifiers, we also find post -modifiers—modifiers coming after a noun.
The most common post-modifier is prepositional phrases:
the book on the table
*
civil conflict in Africa
*
the Senate of the United States
*
Post-modifiers can be short
a dream deferred
*
or long, as in Martin Luther King Jr.’s reference to
a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves
*
and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together
at a table of brotherhood.
What does King have? A dream? No. He has a specific dream. Once we are sensitive to the existence of noun phrases, we recognize a relatively simple structure to the sentence. Here we recognize a noun phrase with a very long post-modifier—thirty-two words to be exact.
We do not get lost in the flow of words, but recognize structure. At the point that we recognize structure within the sentence, we recognize meaning. (Notice also that post-modifiers often include clauses which themselves include complete sentences, as in the last example above.)
Post-modifiers commonly answer the traditional news reporting questions of who , what , where , when , how , or why . Noun post-modifiers commonly take the following forms:
prepositional phrase the dog in the store
*
_ing phrase the girl running to the store
*
_ed past tense the man wanted by the police
*
wh - clauses the house where I was born
*
that/which clauses the thought that I had yesterday
*
If you see a preposition, wh - word ( which, who, when where ), -ing verb form, or that or which after a noun, you can suspect a post-modifier and the completion of a noun phrase.
The noun together with all pre- and post-modifiers constitutes a single unit, a noun phrase that indicates the complete reference. Any agreement in terms of singular/plural is with the noun at the center.
The boys on top of the house are .............
*
Here the noun at the center of the noun phrase is plural, so a plural form of the verb is called for (not a singular form to agree with the singular house) .
In school, we were taught that pronouns replaced nouns . Not so. Pronouns replace complete noun phrases . Pronoun replacement thus offers a test of a complete noun phrase. Consider:
The boy ate the apple in the pie.
What did he eat?
The boy ate the apple in the pie.
*
Want proof? Introduce the pronoun “it” into the sentence. If a pronoun truly replaces a noun, we’d get
*The boy ate the it in the pie.
No native speaker would say that! They’d say
The boy ate it.
The pronoun replaces the complete noun phrase, the apple in the pie .
This pronoun substitution test can be particualrly useful. Not all prepositional phrases after a noun are necessarily part of the noun phrase – they could be later predicate or sentence modifiers. In other words, we must not only identify noun phrases, we must parse out other material, and in that act recognize broader aspects of sentence structure. The web page on distinguishing sentence and predicate modifiers (www.criticalreading.com/sentence_predicate_modifiers.htm) discusses the three sentences:
- 1. The boy ate the apple in the pie.
- 2. The boy ate the apple in the summer.
- 3. The boy ate the apple in a hurry.
Only the first includes a noun phrase longer than two words: the apple in the pie. 
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