A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§ 1 Introductory survey 83

(c) Dependents. There are various kinds of dependent that occur exclusively or

almost exclusively with nouns as head. Examples of such items are underlined in [3].

[3] CERTAIN DETERMINATIVES the door; {! year; every book, which paper

young children, a f2ig dog, recent events

the guy who fa inted, the book I'm reading

ii PRE-HEAD ADJECTIVES

11 Relative clauses

Nouns and concrete objects

The noun category includes words denoting all kinds of physical objects (people,
animals, places, things) and substances: apple, dog, fire, London, sister, water, etc.
We can't use this as the criterion for identifying English nouns, though, because
there are also large numbers of nouns denoting abstract entities: absence, debt,fear,
love, silence, work, etc. But we can use it as the basis for a general definition apply­
ing across languages:

[4] NOUN: a grammatically distinct category of words wh ich includes those

denoting all kinds of physical ob jects, such as persons, animals and inanimate

objects.

Types of dependent

Dependents in the structure of the NP are of three main types. We introduce them
briefly here, and then deal with them in more detail in §§3-6.

[ 5 ] DETERMINERS

ii COMPLEMENTS

iii MODIFIERS

the news, {! pear; some cheese, two new films, no reason

the loss of blood, a ban on smoking, the fa ct that she's alive

a young woman, a friend from Boston, people who complained

The determiner is a kind of dependent found only in NP structure. It is normally

an obligatory element in NPs with certain types of singular noun as head.

Compare The door is open and *Door is open, or compare 1 bought {! book and

*1 bought book.

Complements have to be licensed by the head noun - as complements in clause

structure have to be licensed by the head verb. Compare his loss of blood with He

was losing blood. Note that nouns like fa ct, knowledge, or suggestion can be

accompanied by such subordinate clauses as that she's alive, but nouns like boy,

madness, or inquiry cannot.

Modifiers are the default type of dependent, lacking the above special features;

there is no limit to the number of modifiers that can occur in an NP. Those in [iii],

for example, can combine in a single NP: a young woman fro m Boston who

complained.

Nominals

In clause structure we have recognised a unit intermediate between the clause and
the verb, namely the verb phrase. In the same way we recognise a unit intermediate
between the noun phrase and the noun, which we call a nominal. In the guy who