Word order in english noun phrases in comparison with vietnamese

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING
HANOI OPEN UNIVERSITY








NGUYEN THI HONG PHUONG

WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH
NOUN PHRASES IN COMPARISON WITH VIETNAMESE

(TRẬT TỰ TỪ TRONG CỤM DANH TỪ TIẾNG ANH
SO SÁNH VỚI TIẾNG VIỆT)


M.A. THESIS

Field: English Language
Code: 60220201
Supervisor: Dr. Le Van Thanh


HANOI – 2013

i
DECLARATION

I hereby declare that no part of the enclosed Master Thesis has been
copied or reproduced by me from any other’s work without acknowledgement
and that the thesis is originally written by me under strict guidance of my
supervisor.


Hanoi, 21
st
November, 2013

Supervisor Student


Le Van Thanh Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong




ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to express my great gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Le Van
Thanh of Hanoi Open University for his enormously invaluable advice,
enlightening guidance and encouragement which are indispensable for the
accomplishment of this study.

I am grateful for the precious support of the teachers at Postgraduate
Faculty who producing me with knowledge and basic skills to finish this
study.
I also would like to send my thanks to all my friends who have helped
me to develop ideas for the study.
Finally, my thanks must go to my family members whose continual
encouragement has been indispensable for the fulfillment of this challenging work.


Hanoi, 21
st
November, 2013



Nguyen Thi Hong Phuong






iii

ABBREVIATIONS

H : Head (0)
M : Modiffier (1a)
PrM : Pre-modifier ( )
D : Determiner ( )

PoM : Post-modifier ( )












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TABLE OF CONTENTS
DECLARATION i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ii
ABBREVIATIONS iii
INTRODUCTION 1
1. Rationale of the study 1
2. Aims of the study 2
3. Research questions 3
4. Scopes of the study 3
5. Methods of the study 3
6. Design of the study 4
DEVELOPMENT 5
Chapter 1. THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES 5
1.1. Contrastive analysis 5
1.1.1.A short history of contrastive studies 5

1.1.2. What is Contrastive Analysis? 6
1.2. Word and word order 9
1.2.1. Word 9
1.2.2. Word order and Linearity 12
1.2.3. Word order, patterns and structure 13
1.3. Phrases 15
Chapter 2. WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES 18
2.1. Word order in general structures of English noun phrases 18
2.2. Word order in noun phrase variants 23
2.3. The head 27
2.4. Word order or pre-modification 27
2.4.1. Position 1a: 27
2.4.2. Position 2a 30
2.4.3. Position 3a 32
2.4.4. Position 4a 33
2.5. Post-modification 1b 35



v
2.5.1. Relative clause 35
2.5.2. Phrases with a preposition as head 36
2.5.3. Participles (the ING-participle and the ED-participle) 36
2.5.4. Adjectives 36
2.6. Grammatical categories of noun and their reflection through word order
37
2.7. Articles as determiners 39
Chapter 3. WORD ORDER IN VIETNAMESE NOUN PHRASES 45
3.1. General word order 45
3.2. Variants 47

3.2.1. Noun phrases with one modifying item and the head 48
3.2.2. Noun phrases with two modifying items and the head 48
3.2.3. Noun phrases with three modifying item and the head 48
3.2.4. Noun phrases with four modifying items and head 48
3.3. The head 49
3.3.1.Determination of the head 49
3.3.2. Noun phrases with two heads (head one and head two) 54
3.3.3. Relationship between head one and head two in the noun phrases
54
3.4. Pre-modification 58
3.4.1. Position 1 58
3.4.2. Position 2 60
3.4.3. Position 3 61
3.5. Post-modification 64
3.5.1. Position 1’ 64
3.5.2. Position 2’ 68
Chapter 4. NOUN PHRASES IN ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE A
CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS 72
4.1. The heads of noun phrases 72
4.2. Pre-modification 75
4.2.1. Position1a: 75



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4.2.2. Position 2a 76
4.2.3. Position 3a 77
4.2.4. Position 4a 78
4.3. Post-modification 79

4.3.1. Relative clause as post-modification 79
4.3.2. Participles as postmodifiers 80
4.3.3. Prepositional phrases as post-modification 81
4.4. Some predictions of Vietnamese students’ errors or mistakes in
learning English noun phrases 81
CONCLUSION 88
REFERENCES 89




1

INTRODUCTION
1. Rationale of the study
In the process of learning English, Vietnamese learners are likely to
produce such incorrect phrases “hat red” or “one night summer hot”. This can
be elucidated by the interference of the mother tongue. The former error is
probably due to the transfer of the Vietnamese pattern “chiếc mũ đỏ” and the
latter “một đêm hè oi ả”. Now it can be seen that these errors and many more
that can be found happening very often in learning English are concerned with
the word order of noun phrases. This is why many linguistics as well as
methodologists is unanimous in the claim that language 1 (native language)
influence is manifested in the learner’s use of language 2. In other words,
many errors by language 2 learners are attributable to language 1 interference.
It is also the main idea which laid the foundation for contrastive analysis (CA)
in history of linguistic inquiry.
This study is itself a contrastive analysis which attempts to exploit the
power of contrastive in predicting the difficulties Vietnamese learners may
encounter when learning English noun phrases.

There are a number of reasons that lead for this study to be carried out.
Some of which can be listed as follows:
1.1. Theoretically, the word order is an important issue of grammatical
structures, a general presentation of linearity of linguistic signifiers that has
been paid much attention to by both English and Vietnamese linguistics.
However, there has been almost no detailed systematic research on this issue,
or to mention the study of the word order of noun phrases, and especially
contrastive analysis of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases
has not yet been done. It is, therefore, necessary not only to study but also


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make a contrastive analysis of the word order of noun phrases in the two
languages.
1.2. In practice, foreign language teaching especially English language
teaching has become more and more popular as well as Vietnamese language
teaching for foreigners which has been developing rapidly recently based on
the linguistic, of which contrastive analysis of grammatical structures is one
of the best ways for teachers to improve their teaching quality and for learners
to smoothly gain and practice the transferred knowledge.
This study intends to present some discussions and add comments to
one of the most important issues of theoretical grammar between the two
languages, English and Vietnamese, which have both different and similar
grammatical structures. As well this study has its significance practically as it
would make its consideration to the effective foreign language
teaching/learning, especially English language teaching/learning.
2. Aims of the study
The study aims at analyzing word order in English and Vietnamese
noun phrases.

The study findings show:
- A systemic description of basic word order in English and Vietnamese
noun phrases.
- Basic word orders and the changes of word order in English and
Vietnamese noun phrases.
- Some similarities and differences between word order in English and
Vietnamese noun phrases.
- Common mistakes when using word order in English and Vietnamese
noun phrases and solutions.


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- Some suggestions in translating word order in English and Vietnamese
noun phrases.
3. Research questions
- What are types of word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases?
- What are similarities and differences of word order in noun phrases
between the two languages?
- What are main functions of word order in English and Vietnamese noun
phrases?
- What are suggestions for learners and teachers of the two languages in
learning and teaching word order in English and Vietnamese noun phrases?
4. Scopes of the study
This paper attempts to focus on the contrastive analysis of the word
order of noun phrases in English and Vietnamese. In this study the most
important principles of the word order shall be described, the potential forces
to the operation of these principles are also sought. At the same time the
contrastive analysis is conducted on both the formal and operating rules of the
word order in noun phrases. In a word, it is an attempt to draw a picture on

the word order of noun phrases in the two languages – English and
Vietnamese.
5. Methods of the study
This paper, with the said aims, is of a descriptive and contrastive
analysis study with English taken as the basic language. Thus the methods for
this study are:
5.1. To describe the word order of noun phrases of both languages by the
method of induction, i.e. a list of each type shall be made, after all the
component descriptions are made, a general picture is then drawn for each
language for the issue to be studied.


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5.2. To make a contrastive analysis of the area in question, of which:
- Starts with the comparison and analysis on the construction (grammatical
relations and forms of the word order of noun phrases), and
- Pointing out influential forces that cause the differences on the structural
organization and operation of the word order. However this paper does not
attempt to deal with semantic analysis.
6. Design of the study
This study is divided into three parts, of which the first part is for the
introduction which outlines the background, aim and methods of the study.
The second part consists of five chapters. Chapters 1 provides the theoretical
preliminaries and reviews the word order in the literature. Chapter 2 presents
and describes the word order of English noun phrases. Chapter 3 deals with
that of Vietnamese noun phrases. Chapter 4 presents concrete contrastive
analysis of word order of noun phrases in English and Vietnamese, looks at
some of the errors Vietnamese learners often make when learning English
noun phrases, then suggests some types of exercises. The last part, which is

the conclusion, presents a review of the study by summarizing the main points
discussed in the previous parts, provides suggestions for further study and
dues the limitations of this thesis.



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DEVELOPMENT
Chapter 1
THEORETICAL PRELIMINARIES
This chapter will review the literature which relates to 1.1. Contrastive
analysis, 1.2. Word and word order, 1.3. Phrases. It will, therefore, serve as
the theoretical backgrounds for what is being presented in the following
chapters.
1.1. Contrastive analysis
1.1.1. A short history of contrastive studies
It is very difficult to trace the beginning of contrastive linguists.
Comparison of languages is as old as languages themselves and as old as
contacts between speakers of different languages. Comparison between
languages has had many aspects: from amateurish accidental during social
contacts to more systematic investigations; from comparative linguists
classifying languages according to their origin to, more recently, contrastive
linguists with more practical aims in view. Although the aims and methods of
contrastive analysis were not defined clearly until quite recently, contrastive
studies were written in a more systematic fashion as early as the beginning of
twentieth century. One of the first contrastivists was Vilem Mathesius. His
works are particularly important as the first works recognizing the necessity
of going beyond the sentence to reach a full and adequate description of
language. One of the fundamental concepts of his school is the concept of the

functional sentence perspective according to which each sentence consists of
“theme” and “rhyme”, now also called “topic” and “comments”. As has been
said functional sentence perspective has only recently been recognized, and
its importance is reflected in the ever increasing number of references to it
such as Boliger, Halliday, Di Pietro and Chomsky. The importance of


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contrastive analysis was also recognized in America as early as 1940s when
Whorf wrote: “Much progress has been made in classifying language of the
earth into genetic families each having descent from a single precursor, and in
tracing such developments through time. The result is called “comparative
linguists” – of even greater importance for the future technology of thought is
what might be called “contrastive linguists”. This plots the outstanding
differences among tongues – in grammar, logic and general analysis of
experience.
One most important aim, if not the only aim of contrastive analysis, is
its application in foreign language teaching. This aim is to be achieved
through the study of bilingualism. Languages, when used by bilingual
speakers, influence each other at all levels of linguistic structure. The
influence of one language on another in a bilingual situation is described as
“interference”, now one of the fundamental notions in language teaching. The
1960’s saw a range of contrastive analysis published (typically between
English and other languages) and a host of language teaching courses made
available. Through these major contrastive projects contrastive analysis has
had much to offer to translation theory, the description of particular
languages, language typology and the study of linguist universals. Because of
its closeness, however, to language learning and to the more general concept
of bilingualism, contrastive analysis has always been regarded as a major

branch of applied, rather than pure linguists.
1.1.2. What is Contrastive Analysis?
Classification of linguist enterprise involves three dimensions or areas:
It was pointed out that there are two broad approaches to linguists, the
generalist and the particularist and that on the one hand, linguists treat
individual languages: English, French, Chinese, and so on. On the other hand,


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they consider the general phenomenon of human language, of which
particular languages are examples.
Along the second dimension linguists divisible into those who choose
to study one, or each, language in isolation and those whose ambition and
methods are comparative.
The third dimension is that used by De Saussure to distinguish “two
sciences of language”: diachronic as opposed to synchronic: “everything that
relates to the static side of our science is synchronic; everything that has to do
with evolution is diachronic. Similarly, synchrony designate respectively as a
language state and evolutionary phase”. [35, 81]
Contrastive analysis with a nature as a linguist enterprise is neither
generalist nor particularist, but somewhere intermediate on a scale between
the two extremes. Likewise, contrastive analysis is as interested in the
inherent genius of the language under its purview as it is in the comparability
of languages. Yet it is not concerned with classification, and, as the term
“contrastive” implies, more interested in differences between languages than
in their likenesses.
Contrastive analysis seems, therefore, to be a hybrid linguist enterprise.
In term of the three criteria discussed here we might venture the following
provisional definition: contrastive analysis is a linguist enterprise which aims

at producing inverted (i.e. contrastive, not comparative) two-valued
typologies (a contrastive analysis is always concerned with a pair of
languages), and founded on the assumption that languages can be compared.
C. James (12) pointed out that contrastive analysis belongs to interlanguage
study which is interested in the emergence of language rather than in the
finished product. Accordingly, contrastive analysis is to be viewed as
diachronic rather than synchronic in orientation. He also pointed out that


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contrastive analysis is one of three branches of two valued (two languages are
involved) interlingual linguists: translation theory – which is concerned with
the process of text conversion, error analysis and contrastive analysis. The last
two have as the object of enquiry the means whereby a monolingual learns to
be bilingual.
Although the point of departure for such studies is the two languages
concern (NLand FL in the case of language learns, SLor “source language”
and the TL “target language” in the case of translation), the focus of attention
is on the intermediate space between the two. The “language” which comes in
a discussion of translation theory an “interlingua”: it is a system which
encompasses, as is desirable for translation, the analysis characteristics of the
SL and the synthetically characteristics of the TL text. There is one
Interlingua for each pair of texts. By contrast, it is suggested by error analysis
that the learner, in progressing towards mastery of the FL, develops a series of
“approximate systems” or “transitional dialects”, which are successive and
intersecting, such that each stage has unique features as well as features which
it shares with the immediately preceding and the intersecting circles in the
figure below.
Contrastive analysis has been characterized as being a form of

interlingual study, or of “interlinguists”. As such, and in certain other
respects, it has much in common with the study of bilingualism. Bilingualism,
by definition, is not the study of individual single languages, or of language in
general, but of the possession of two languages. Bilingualism refers to the
possession of two languages by an individual or society whereas contrastive
analysis is concerned with how a monolingual becomes bilingual. Contrastive
analysis concerns with the effects exerted by the NL on the language being learnt,
the FL.


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1.2. Word and word order
1.2.1. Word
Traditional grammars make use of a fairly wide technical vocabulary to
describe the concepts they use – words like “noun”, “singular”, “phrase” and
even “word” itself. They often began with a statement of “parts of speech”,
which today would be called “word classes”. According to most grammarians
there are eight parts of speech: Noun, Pronoun, Adjective, Verb, Preposition,
Conjunct, Adverb, and Injection. However C.C. Fries, an American scholar
suggested that English had four parts of speech he labeled classes 1, 2, 3, 4,
but they are clearly what would normally be called “Nouns”, “Verbs”,
“Adjectives”, and “Adverbs”. Whereas Eastwood [23, 2] has a little different
idea on these word classes when he labels eight word classes in English:
Noun, Pronoun, Adjective, Verb, Preposition, Conjunct, Adverb, and
Determiner which belong to either “vocabulary words” (verb, noun, adjective,
adverb) or “grammatical words” (preposition, determiner, pronoun, and
conjunct). Though the term “parts of speech” is a good term to use in text
books, methodological materials, and practical grammar books, it can serve as
a good starting point to go further into linguistic research. There are a number

of questions on these ideas such as why there are only four or eight of speech
but no more and so on.
A famous definition of the word is that of the great American linguist
Leonard Bloomfield. He thought of words as “minimal free forms” – that is,
the smallest units of speech that can meaningfully stand on their own [30, 47].
Again many find this definition unsatisfactory as it can’t cope with several
items are treated as words in writing but which never stand on their own in
natural speech (such as the and of).


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However, attempts have been made in order to search for a satisfactory
definition of the notion “word”. Accordingly a number of criteria have been
set up to clarify it and make it more convincing. Meaning is one of these
criteria as specific parts of speech or word classes are considered and then
viewed with the light of meaning. From this point of view, a noun is a word
used for naming anything. Verbs generally refer to action, events, and
processes. Adjectives typically amplify the meaning of a noun or function to
designate a property or attribute that is applicable to the types of entities
denoted by nouns. An adverb is defined as a word that modifies a verb, an
adjective or an adverb. Of course this is not satisfactory enough for two
reasons. Firstly, meaning does not always provide a clear indication of its
category membership, and secondly in some cases, words with similar
meanings belong to different categories. F. Palmer [30, 43] suggested three
main approaches to define what a word. The first is to see the word as a
semantic unit, a unit of meaning; the second sees it as a phonetic or
phonological unit, one that is marked, if not by ‘space’ or pause, at least by
some features of the sounds of the language; the attempts to establish the
word by a variety of linguist procedures that are associated with the idea that

the word is in some ways an isolable and individual unit.
In conclusion, however argumentative the concept of word may be, it is
certain that a view of the word, the smallest syntactical element, should be
based on different criteria and taken from a diverse and integrated perspective
to ensure a reliable investigation and serve as the foundation to go to other
syntactical elements.
According to D. Crystal (16) the term “word order” refers both to the
order of words in a phrase and to the order of multi-word units within a
sentence. The words in a phrase or a sentence are arranged in a certain order,


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which is fixed for every type of the phrase and a sentence, and is therefore
meaningful. The main function of word order is to express grammatical
relations and determine the grammatical status of a word by fixing its position
in the phrase or in a sentence.
In linguist description, word order usually refers to the sequence in
which grammatical elements such as S, V, and O occur in sentences. A great
deal of attention has been paid to the way in which languages vary the order
of these elements, as part of typological studies.
As has been said above, word order expresses grammatical relations
and determines the grammatical status of a word. Then a change of the word
order often leads to either a change of the sentence meaning or a break down
of sentence structure, or both. In other words, any change of the position of a
word in a sentence often leads to a change of its grammatical status and
consequently a change of whole meaning of the sentence. Thus in the two
sentences below:
1. Maxim defends Victor [27, 139]
2. Mẹ yêu con [50, 116]

The position of words in these sentences is fixed with Maxim and mẹ as
subjects and Victor defends Maxim and con as objects. Then if the word order
of the two sentences change to:
3. Victor defends Maxim [27, 139]
4. Con yêu mẹ [50, 116]
Now Victor and Con are subjects and Maxim and mẹ are objects, and
the meaning is totally different.
In order to obtain a further understanding on the word order within the
internal structure of sentences and the distribution of the units forming them,
we will consider the following properties:


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1.2.2. Word order and Linearity
No one can utter simultaneously all the words of a sentence. Nor could
such an utterance be understood. Words are spoken (or written) and heard (or
read) in a time sequence from early to later. According to F.D. Saussure, a
linguist sign consists of 2 sides, labeled as signifie (i.e, “the thing signified”)
and significant (i.e, “the thing which signifies”); the relationship between
them is arbitrary. The significant occur in the stream of time and thus are
governed by the characteristics of time. Time is by nature one-way direction,
so the significant come out successively in a one-way direction, forming a
sequence. In writing, the stream of time is replaced by the span of lines. Any
sentence, for Saussure, is a sequence of signs, each sign contributing
something to the meaning of the whole, and each contrasting with all other
signs in the language. This sequence can be seen as a syntagmatic relationship
– that is, a linear relationship between the signs which are present in the
sentence. E.g., in the sentence “I saw Tom last week”, there is a syntagmatic
relationship, consisting of 4 signs in a particular order: S + Predicate + Direct

Object + Time Adverbial. Saussure [35, 213] points out that linearity as a
property of language makes it impossible for people to produce two linguist
signs simultaneously. This idea is supported by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (42) that if
two sounds a&b are to be combined together there are only two combinatorial
possibilities: either ab or ba. In a word, when a person hears or looks at a
display of speech or writing, the dimension he is most conscious of is a
horizontal one, which shows the linear order of the bits of language. Apart
from the view of linear sequences of words, there are groupings within these
sequences. That results in hierarchical structures on which sister and daughter
relations can be defined. A particular sequence may be structurally
ambiguous, giving rise to more than one interpretation, each corresponding to


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a different constituent structure tree. In addition to these properties of linearity
and hierarchy, there is another property of categoriality. The words of
sentences fall into lexical categories, with each category (and subcategory)
having its special properties and distribution.
1.2.3. Word order, patterns and structure
The term “chain” is used by M. Berry (7) to refer to the horizontal
dimension of language or the syntagmatic of language. In her point of view
any utterance consists of the number of bits of language, one after another, in
a sequence, the sequence being one-dimensional like a line. The dimension
along which the sequence occurs is called the dimension of axis of chain.
Each bit of language forms a link in the whole chain of a complete utterance.
Also according to her, the dimension of chain in spoken language can be
regarded as a time dimension and that in written language as a either time
dimension or a space dimension. Patterns occur along the dimension of chain.
Each has a number of patterns which belong to it but does not have certain

others. For instance, English has the grammatical pattern which can be found
in the old man (not “*man old the”); a Vietnamese grammatical pattern is
shown in “một ông già” (not “* một già ông”). This pattern is composed of
bits of language which occur one after another along the axis of chain.
A sentence is a string of words or morphemes, but it is worth noting
that not all strings of words or morphemes constitute sentences in a language
because according to D. Blair (27) sentences are not simply random strings of
words and morphemes but conform to specific patterns determined by the
syntactic rules of the language. This statement is true of all human languages.
Only those strings that conform to the syntactic rules are called sentences or
grammatical sentences of the language, and the strings of morphemes that do


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not are called ungrammatical. For instance, the following strings marked with
an asterisk are ungrammatical:
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless [39, 157]
Milk the crumpled verb a [39, 157]
But when these strings are rearranged according to English patterns
they become syntactically well-formed although they do not make much sense
and sound “funny”.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously [39, 157]
A verb crumpled the milk [39, 157]
Syntactic rules permit speakers to produce and understand any of an
infinite set of possible sentences which may be never produced or heard
before. It is syntactic rules that determine the correct order of words in a
sentence; accordingly sentences are more than words placed one after another
like beads on a string.
In the Vietnamese language, word order is one of the two grammatical

devices because Vietnamese is an uninflectional and isolating language in
which grammatical functions can only be relied upon the use of word order
and function words.
E.g.:
Bao giờ chị đi chợ? [38, 241]
Chị đi chợ bao giờ? [38, 241]
In this example the order of word closely refers to the meaning of time.
The word “bao giờ” as in Chị đi chợ bao giờ? refers to the past and the word
“bao giờ” as in Bao giờ chị đi chợ? refers to the future.
In addition, word order in different structures in Vietnamese expresses
different grammatical meaning. In the sentence “Bắc yêu Nam”, Bắc is the
giver and Nam is the receiver. But in the sentence “Nam yêu Bắc”, Nam now


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is the giver and Bắc is the receiver [41, 223]. The word orders in this example
show the grammatical meaning “Giver – Receiver”. This is true with other
meanings such as “Cardinal number – Ordinal number” as in “phòng 3 (room
No.3) and 3 phòng (three rooms)” and so on.
Although English is an inflecting language but it is more isolating than
many other European languages. Hence, besides using such grammatical
means as inflectional and derivational suffixes, root inflection, etc. English
also employs word order to show grammatical relationships.
E.g.:
The black cat frightened Mary (i)
Mary frightened the black cat (ii)
The words in the above sentences are the same but it is the word order
which indicates who frightened whom, and that it is the black cat in sentence
(i) and Mary in sentence (ii)

In English the role of word order is also necessary in distinguishing.
E.g.: “hairroot” from “root hair”, the former means “the root of the hair”
whereas the later refers to the hair of the root of some plants. Or in “a horse
race” (races among horses with riders) and “a race horse” (a horse bred or
kept to run in races); or in “a flower garden” (a garden with flowers planted)
and “a garden flower” (a flower cultivated in gardens” [48, 25].
This paper concerns with the order of words in noun phrases then such
issues will be further studied with more details in the following chapters.
In conclusion English and Vietnamese, although of different type of
languages, employ word order as a grammatical device.
1.3. Phrases
The sentence consists of words but it is generally agreed that words do
not pattern directly into sentences. Words are grouped into elements that


16

treated as intervening levels of organization between words and sentences.
The intervening units between word and sentence are usually called phrases.
Phrases are equivalent to “word-grouping”. Halliday [31, 159] says
“describing a sentence as a construction of words is rather like describing a
house as a construction of bricks, without recognizing the walls and the
rooms as intermediate structural units…” He also denotes that a phrase is
different from a group. By his explanation a group is an expansion of a word,
a phrase is a contraction of a clause.
Traditional grammars use “phrase” to refer to a special kind of
embedded sentence – one without a finite verb. E.g.: in the sentence “He did
not know what to do”, “what to do” is a noun phrase, not a noun clause. The
embedded “what to do” here has still many of characteristics of a sentence
and that is where arguments arise. In this case, R. Quirk (32) would attach

“non-finite clause” to the embedded.
Words pattern into phrases which mean that phrases may be described
in terms of the kind of classes of words that function in them, and of the order
in which the words or classes of words arranged relate to each other.
One of the good definitions may be that given by O’Grady and
Dobrovolsky [9, 159]. They say “sentences have hierarchical structures
consisting of groups of words that may themselves consist of group of words,
and so on. This section will focus the internal structure of syntactical units
built around nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions with an emphasis on
the organizational properties that they have in common. Such units are called
phrases”. Sentences are thus analyzable into phrases.
They then further pointed out phrases.
XP (specifier) X (complement)
And four specific rules:


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NP (Det.) N (Prepositional Phrase)
V (Auxiliary) V (Noun Phrase)
AP (Degree word) A (Prepositional Phrase)
PP (Degree word) P (Noun Phrase)
(in which NP is a Noun Phrase, a VP Verb Phrase, AP an Adjective Phrase
and PP, a Prepositional Phrase). Some grammar books may add Adverb
Phrase (Adv P) to this list of kinds of phrase but structurally more typical of
phrases are still the four NP, VP, AP and PP. R. Huddleston (37) lists three
properties of a phrase as below:
(i) It (a phrase) is a group of 2 or more words.
(ii) It does not contain a “finite” verb.
(iii) It is functionally equivalent to a single word, and will thus be classified

according to the part of speech of the kind of word to which it is equivalent.
Among these phrases listed above the most important ones of the
sentences, as regarded by F. Palmer (30), are Verb phrases and the noun
phrases.
As far as the Noun phrase in English is concerned it is defined by R.
Quirk [32, 127] as follows:
“The noun phrase is that element in the sentence which typically
functions as subject, object and complement”
There shares the same view when there is a saying that noun phrase
may be easily identified because they can function as ‘subject’ or ‘object’ in a
sentence and only noun phrase may do so.






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Chapter 2
WORD ORDER IN ENGLISH NOUN PHRASES
Many noun phrases in English are simple forms consisting perhaps just
of a noun like cabbages in “The truck was loaded with cabbages” or a
pronoun like they in “They flew down to Aiken, South Carolina” [39, 97]
(actually pronouns are a special class of noun). In fact almost noun phrases
often consist of much longer than single words. Examples 1 - 3 are noun
phrases:
1. The pretty girl
2. The pretty girl in the corner
3. The pretty girl who is standing in the corner

A noun phrase is thus composed of potential parts: a head element and
one or more dependents. The head element is obligatory; its presence is the
minimal requirement of the occurrence of a noun phrase. The other parts
occur optionally. Some dependents precede the head, others follow, we will
refer to them as pre-modification as termed by R. Quirk (32) or post – head as
by R. Huddleston (37) respectively.
E.g.:
Anew chapter in a novel [8, 108]
Pre-modifier Head Post-modifier
The stone frame of my door [8, 71]
Pre-modifier Head Post-modifier
Now we go further into the word order in English noun phrases.
2.1. Word order in general structures of English noun phrases
In English there is an argument that the structure of noun phrases
consists of only Determiner(s), Pre-modifier(s), the Head, and Post-