Overview

In the previous chapter, we looked at the way in which the grammatical properties of words can be described in terms of grammatical categories or grammatical features. In this chapter, we turn to address the rather different question of the ways in which words can be combined together to form phrases and sentences, and we look at how we can represent the structure of the phrases and sentences thereby formed.

Forming phrases

To put our discussion on a concrete footing, let's consider how an elementary two-word phrase such as that produced by speaker B in the following mini-dialogue is formed:

1. SPEAKER A: What's the government planning to do?

2. SPEAKER B: Privatize hospitals

As speaker B's utterance illustrates, the simplest way of forming a phrase is by combining two words together: for example, by combining the word privatize with the word hospitals in (1), we form the phrase privatize hospitals.

An important question to ask, however, is the following: ‘When two words combine together to form a phrase, what grammatical properties does the resulting phrase have, and how are they determined?’ There is clear evidence that the grammatical properties of phrases are determined by one of the two words in the phrase. For example, when we combine a verb like privatize with a noun like hospitals, the resulting phrase privatize hospitals seems to have verbal (= verblike) rather than nominal (= nounlike) properties.