Anatomy of a sentence

When we look at a sentence on a page, we see little more than a sequence of words. However, the linear presentation of printed sentences belies their highly ordered and hierarchical internal structure. When we read a sentence aloud, we tend naturally to group certain items. Consider, for example, the simple English sentence below:

The little girl with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut.

Here ‘The little girl’, or ‘with the red ribbon’ both seem to form natural groupings or phrases, while ‘girl with the’ or ‘ribbon ate the large’ do not. On this basis we can, provisionally, divide the sentence into three phrases:

The little girl       with the red ribbon     ate the large doughnut.

These are not groupings of equals, however. Within each phrase, one item seems more important than the rest. Using traditional parts of speech, we can parse the first phrase, ‘The little girl’, in the following way:

The little girl

Art Adj N

Within this grouping, the noun (N) girl seems more important than the adjective (Adj) little: the sentence remains grammatical if we delete little, but not if we delete girl:

1 The girl with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut.

2 *The little with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut.

Deleting the article produces a sequence (or string) that is more acceptable than the second example above but is nonetheless odd:

3 ?Little girl with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut.

There are, however, other good reasons for seeing the article as in some sense secondary to the noun here. One can think, for example, of grammatical sentences beginning with nouns unaccompanied by articles, but there are none beginning with articles without nouns:

Boys will be boys

Sincerity is a virtue

Paula missed the bus

*The will be boys

*The is a virtue

*The missed the bus

Both the article and the adjective therefore seem subordinate to the noun girl in sentence 3 above. Phrases like these which have a noun as their head are known as noun phrases (NPs).

The phrase ate the large doughnut itself contains an NP (the large doughnut), headed by the noun doughnut. But this noun phrase itself seems to be subordinate to the verb (V) ate. Using the same test, deletion of the verb produces an ungrammatical sentence:

*The little girl with the red ribbon the large doughnut.

While we cannot delete the verb, we can in this case delete the noun phrase the large doughnut and treat ate as a one-place predicate as defined above, or indeed substitute another verb in its place to produce a grammatical sentence:

The little girl with the red ribbon ate.

The little girl with the red ribbon listened.

The little girl with the red ribbon played.

We conclude that this is a verb phrase (VP), headed by the verb ate, and consisting of a verb and a noun phrase.

In similar vein, the second grouping with the red ribbon can be construed as a prepositional phrase (PP), consisting of a preposition (P) with and a noun phrase the red ribbon. This prepositional phrase, however, seems less central to the sentence than the NP or the VP. We can delete it and the sentence remains grammatical:

The little girl ate the large doughnut.

If we delete the first noun phrase, however, the sentence becomes ungrammatical, and if we delete the verb phrase, the result is grammatical but no longer a sentence:

*with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut

The little girl with the red ribbon

Furthermore, this prepositional phrase appears to form part of the noun phrase headed by girl. We have seen that pronouns can replace only full constituent NPs and, applying this substitution test to our sentence, we find that the pronoun she can substitute for The little girl with the red ribbon but not (in most varieties of English) for The little girl on its own:

She ate the large doughnut

*She with the red ribbon ate the large doughnut

We can therefore say that The little girl with the red ribbon is a complex noun phrase (NP), consisting of noun phrase (NP) and a prepositional phrase (PP), and headed by girl. In traditional terms, this NP forms the subject (or subject complement) and the VP the predicate, within which the NP the large doughnut forms the direct object complement.