CONSTITUENTFUNCTION

Noun phrase were described as performing three basic function

Look at tree diagram below.

NP AUX

VP

N VB NP

Workers should obey Their boss

S

• The constituent s immediately dominates three constituents, only one of which is a noun phrase. The noun phrase immediately dominated by S will be called the deep structure subject of a sentence. In this example, the deep subject noun phrase tells who “doer of the action”. The underlined example below is a subject of deep structure

NP

S

eg: a president sang National anthem

• A noun phrase that immediately dominated by the verb phrase of a deep structure is the object of that verb phrase or it is traditionally called the “recipients of the action”. NP that is a descendant of VP is also called by the object of verb phrase

VP

NP

However, the objects has not only one interpretation. Depending upon the verbal in the verb phrase.

• Please have a look at the sentence below and try to differentiate the objects in sentence 1 and sentence 2

1. People plant trees2. People burn trees

Only in sentence 2 the object received the action. Object “trees” in sentence 1 is interpreted as an object of the result. It is the result of “planting” by people.

Subject of Surface structure

1. A teacher teach students2. Students are taught by a teacher

Those two sentences have obviously the same meaning. They also have the same deep structure. The only difference between those two is that the second sentence is constructed by passive pattern.

“A teacher” is still a subject of deep structure. To identify deep structure, we can transform passive or negative sentence into “active” sentence. “students” on the other hand is an object of the deep structure while it is a subject of surface structure at the second sentence.

CONT...

• In relation with subject-verb agreement in grammar, subject of surface will be a determiner.

• Eg: Abdullah is supported by his parents.• If agreement determined by deep structure, the

sentence will be• Eg: Abdullah are supported by his parents.

Sentence syntactic function

Relative Clause

SNP

World

world is wide

N

On the example and diagram shown on slide, we could see the embedded sentence performs as relative clause. Eg: World which is wide interests adventurer

Noun phrase complement

• When a sentence (S) is embedded in a noun phrase and directly follows a noun, it is functioned as noun phrase complement

ART

N S

NP

Eg: a challenge for Juleha to learn in Cambridge

Verb Phrase Complements

• When a sentence is embedded in a verb phrase and directly dominated by verb phrase (VP), it is functioned as a verb phrase complement.

VB S

VP

Eg : is excited to join competition