Bracketing

[(poor) (John)] [(ran) (away)]

[they ((can) (fish))] – can is either a modal verb or a full-notional verb.

(Beautiful) (girl’s dress)

(Beautiful girl’s) (dress)  Bracketing does not help in this case.

3. Types of phrases.

Ilyish:

• “noun+noun” is a most usual type of phrase in Modern English. It must be divided into 2 subtypes:

1. “noun in the common case+noun” e.g. speech sound, silver watch, army unit, London Bridge.

2. “noun in the genitive case+noun” has a more restricted meaning and use.

• “adjective+noun” is used to express all possible kinds of things with their properties.

• “verb+noun”  2 types of relations between an action and a thing:

1. the noun denotes an object of the action expressed by the verb – e.g. appoint an hour.

2. but in a certain number of phrases it denotes a measure, rather than the object, of the action - e.g. walk a mile, sleep an hour, wait a minute.

• “noun+verb” – different opinions have been put forward on this issue:

1. the prase type “noun+verb” (or “predicative phrase”) exists and ought to be studied just like any other phrase type.

2. The other view is that no such type as “noun+verb” exists, as combination “noun+verb” constitutes a sentence rather than a phrase. But if we take a man writes on a phrase level, it means that each of the components can be changed in accordance with its paradigm. And in a phrase there is no intonation of its own. But if we take a man writes on a sentence level, then Men have been writing would be a new sentence.

4. Syntactic relations between the components of the phrase.

Ilyish:

Agreement (Concord) – a method of expressing a syntactical relationship, which consists in making the subordinate word take a form similar to that of the word to which it is subordinate. In ME this can refer only to the category of number.

Still agreement of the verb with the noun is a controversial problem. Usually it is treated as agreement of the predicate with the subject, that is, as a phenomenon of sentence structure.

??? Does the verb stand in the plural number because the noun denoting the subject of the action is plural, so that the verb is in the full sense of the word subordinate to the noun? Or does the verb, in its own right, express by its category of number the singularity or plurality of the doer?

My family are early risers.

The United Nations is an international organization.

 The verb can be independent of noun  there is no agreement in number of the verb with the noun expressing the doer of the action.

Government – the use of a certain form of the subordinate word required by its head word, but not coinciding with the for of the head word itself.

The role of government in ME is almost as insignificant as that of agreement. We do not find in English any verbs, or nouns, or adjectives, requiring the subordinate noun to be in one case rather than in another.

As to nouns, the notion of government may be said to have become quite uncertain in present-day English.

I looked at my father

I spent the summer at my father’s

Other Ways – in Russian linguistic theory there is a 3^rd way of expressing syntactical relations between components of a phrase, which is termed примыкание (parataxis) – its characteristic feature is usually described in a negative way, as absence both of agreement and of government. The most usual example of this type of connection is the relation between an adverb abd its head word, whether this is an adjective or a verb. An adverb is subordinate to its head word, without either agreeing with or being governed by it.

e.g. …lashes of rain striped the great windows almost horizontally – adverb horizontally is subordinate to the verb striped.

There is another means of expressing syntactical connection which plays a significant part in ME. It may be called “enclosure” (замыкание) – some element of a phrase is, as it were, enclosed between 2 parts of another element. The most widely known case of “enclosure” is the putting of a word between an article and the noun to which the article belongs.

5. The theory of the phrase as represented by Sweet, Kruisinga and Jespersen.