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77-412: In theories of syntax , a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the syntactic structure of a sentence . It does not have to have any special meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed, but it must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the sentence Yesterday I saw an orange bird with

154-539: A body of study defines " word ") have one meaning when capitalized and another when not. Sometimes the capitalized variant is a proper noun (the Moon ; dedicated to God ; Smith 's apprentice) and the other variant is not (the third moon of Saturn; a Greek god ; the smith 's apprentice). Sometimes neither is a proper noun (a swede in the soup; a Swede who came to see me). Such words that vary according to case are sometimes called capitonyms (although only rarely: this term

231-480: A formal style, this may include the , as in the inimitable Henry Higgins . They may also take the in the manner of common nouns in order to establish the context in which they are unique: the young Mr Hamilton (not the old one), the Dr Brown I know ; or as proper nouns to define an aspect of the referent: the young Einstein (Einstein when he was young). The indefinite article a may similarly be used to establish

308-450: A framework known as grammaire générale , first expounded in 1660 by Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot in a book of the same title , dominated work in syntax: as its basic premise the assumption that language is a direct reflection of thought processes and so there is a single most natural way to express a thought. However, in the 19th century, with the development of historical-comparative linguistics , linguists began to realize

385-596: A functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to inflect – for agreement with its subject (which is the specifier of INFL), for tense and aspect , etc. If these factors are treated separately, then more specific categories may be considered: tense phrase (TP), where the verb phrase is the complement of an abstract "tense" element; aspect phrase ; agreement phrase and so on. Further examples of such proposed categories include topic phrase and focus phrase , which are argued to be headed by elements that encode

462-438: A head, but some non-headed phrases are acknowledged. A phrase lacking a head is known as exocentric , and phrases with heads are endocentric . Some modern theories of syntax introduce functional categories in which the head of a phrase is a functional lexical item. Some functional heads in some languages are not pronounced, but are rather covert . For example, in order to explain certain syntactic patterns which correlate with

539-509: A ministry of home affairs (a common-noun phrase) called the Ministry of Home Affairs (its proper name). Within the context of India, this identifies a unique organization. However, other countries may also have ministries of home affairs called "the Ministry of Home Affairs", but each refers to a unique object, so each is a proper name. Similarly, "Beach Road" is a unique road, though other towns may have their own roads named "Beach Road" as well. This

616-430: A new referent: the column was written by a [ or one] Mary Price . Proper names based on noun phrases differ grammatically from common noun phrases. They are fixed expressions, and cannot be modified internally: beautiful King's College is acceptable, but not King's famous College . As with proper nouns, so with proper names more generally: they may only be unique within the appropriate context. For instance, India has

693-528: A nickname for Cab Calloway and as the title of a film about him). Proper names are also referred to (by linguists) as naming expressions . Sometimes they are called simply names ; but that term is also used more broadly (as in " chair is the name for something we sit on"); the latter type of name is called a common name to distinguish it from a proper name . Common nouns are frequently used as components of proper names. Some examples are agency , boulevard , city , day, and edition . In such cases

770-399: A phrase by any node that exerts dependency upon, or dominates, another node. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence. The trees and phrase-counts demonstrate that different theories of syntax differ in the word combinations they qualify as a phrase. Here the constituency tree identifies three phrases that the dependency trees does not, namely: house at the end of

847-416: A phrase, and the head-word gives its syntactic name, "subordinator", to the grammatical category of the entire phrase. But this phrase, " before that happened", is more commonly classified in other grammars, including traditional English grammars, as a subordinate clause (or dependent clause ); and it is then labelled not as a phrase, but as a clause . Most theories of syntax view most phrases as having

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924-437: A previously unknown label was applied to an unfamiliar object, the children assumed that the label designated the class of object (i.e. they treated the label as the common name of that object), regardless of whether the object was inanimate or not. However, if the object already had an established name , there was a difference between inanimate objects and animals: In English, children employ different strategies depending on

1001-519: A proper noun also cause the article to be dropped (e.g., " jump that shark, Fonz!", " O Pacific, be so on our voyage", "Go Bears!", "U-S-A! U-S-A!"). In grammatical constructs where a definite article would be used even with a proper noun that normally does not use it, only a single article is used (e.g., " the Matterhorn at Disneyland is not the Matterhorn"). In a grouping, a single definite article at

1078-571: A royal name were enclosed in a cartouche : an oval with a line at one end. In Chinese script , a proper name mark (a kind of underline ) has sometimes been used to indicate a proper name. In the standard Pinyin system of romanization for Mandarin Chinese, capitalization is used to mark proper names, with some complexities because of different Chinese classifications of nominal types, and even different notions of such broad categories as word and phrase . Sanskrit and other languages written in

1155-440: A sentence. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase. There are two competing principles for constructing trees; they produce 'constituency' and 'dependency' trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The constituency-based tree is on the left and the dependency-based tree is on the right: The tree on the left is of the constituency-based, phrase structure grammar , and

1232-505: A syntactic theory is often designed to handle. The relation between the topics is treated differently in different theories, and some of them may not be considered to be distinct but instead to be derived from one another (i.e. word order can be seen as the result of movement rules derived from grammatical relations). One basic description of a language's syntax is the sequence in which the subject (S), verb (V), and object (O) usually appear in sentences. Over 85% of languages usually place

1309-417: A white neck , the words an orange bird with a white neck form a noun phrase , or a determiner phrase in some theories, which functions as the object of the sentence. Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase ' trees ', which provide schematics of how the words in a sentence are grouped and relate to each other. A tree shows the words, phrases, and clauses that make up

1386-420: Is a noun is called a noun phrase . The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head. In the following phrases the head-word, or head, is bolded: The above five examples are the most common of phrase types; but, by the logic of heads and dependents, others can be routinely produced. For instance, the subordinator phrase: By linguistic analysis this is a group of words that qualifies as

1463-435: Is a categorial grammar that adds in partial tree structures to the categories. Theoretical approaches to syntax that are based upon probability theory are known as stochastic grammars . One common implementation of such an approach makes use of a neural network or connectionism . Functionalist models of grammar study the form–function interaction by performing a structural and a functional analysis. Generative syntax

1540-494: Is also customary to drop the definite article in tables (e.g., a table of nations or territories with population, area, and economy, or a table of rivers by length). Proper names often have a number of variants, for instance a formal variant ( David , the United States of America ) and an informal variant ( Dave , the United States ). In languages that use alphabetic scripts and that distinguish lower and upper case , there

1617-518: Is also standard that most capitalizing of common nouns is considered incorrect, except of course when the capitalization is simply a matter of text styling, as at the start of a sentence or in titles and other headings. See Letter case § Title case . Although these rules have been standardized, there are enough gray areas that it can often be unclear both whether an item qualifies as a proper name and whether it should be capitalized: "the Cuban missile crisis "

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1694-413: Is concerned. (For a detailed and critical survey of the history of syntax in the last two centuries, see the monumental work by Giorgio Graffi (2001). ) There are a number of theoretical approaches to the discipline of syntax. One school of thought, founded in the works of Derek Bickerton , sees syntax as a branch of biology, since it conceives of syntax as the study of linguistic knowledge as embodied in

1771-616: Is considered a unique abstract entity. Few proper names have only one possible referent: there are many places named New Haven ; Jupiter may refer to a planet, a god, a ship, a city in Florida, or a symphony; at least one person has been named Mata Hari , as well as a racehorse, several songs, several films, and other objects; there are towns and people named Toyota , as well as the company. In English, proper names in their primary application cannot normally be modified by articles or another determiner, although some may be taken to include

1848-460: Is defined as an element that requires two NPs (its subject and its direct object) to form a sentence. That is notated as (NP/(NP\S)), which means, "A category that searches to the right (indicated by /) for an NP (the object) and generates a function (equivalent to the VP) which is (NP\S), which in turn represents a function that searches to the left for an NP and produces a sentence." Tree-adjoining grammar

1925-883: Is not itself a proper name (it can be limited: the Londoner , some Londoners ). Similarly, African , Africanize , and Africanism are not proper names, but are capitalized because Africa is a proper name. Adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and derived common nouns that are capitalized ( Swiss in Swiss cheese ; Anglicize ; Calvinistically ; Petrarchism ) are sometimes loosely called proper adjectives (and so on), but not in mainstream linguistics. Which of these items are capitalized may be merely conventional. Abrahamic , Buddhist , Hollywoodize , Freudianism , and Reagonomics are capitalized; quixotic , bowdlerize , mesmerism , and pasteurization are not; aeolian and alpinism may be capitalized or not. Some words or some homonyms (depending on how

2002-530: Is often capitalized (" Cuban Missile Crisis ") and often not, regardless of its syntactic status or its function in discourse. Most style guides give decisive recommendations on capitalization, but not all of them go into detail on how to decide in these gray areas if words are proper nouns or not and should be capitalized or not. Words or phrases that are neither proper nouns nor derived from proper nouns are often capitalized in present-day English: Dr , Baptist , Congregationalism , His and He in reference to

2079-523: Is scarcely used in linguistic theory and does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary ). In most alphabetic languages, brand names and other commercial terms that are nouns or noun phrases are capitalized whether or not they count as proper names. Not all brand names are proper names, and not all proper names are brand names. In non-alphabetic scripts, proper names are sometimes marked by other means. In Egyptian hieroglyphs , parts of

2156-452: Is simply a matter of the pragmatics of naming, and of whether a naming convention provides identifiers that are unique; and this depends on the scope given by context. Because they are used to refer to an individual entity, proper names are, by their nature, definite; so many regard a definite article as redundant, and personal names (like John ) are used without an article or other determiner. However, some proper names are usually used with

2233-403: Is sometimes called onomastics or onomatology , while a rigorous analysis of the semantics of proper names is a matter for philosophy of language . Occasionally, what would otherwise be regarded as a proper noun is used as a common noun, in which case a plural form and a determiner are possible. Examples are in cases of ellipsis (for instance, the three Kennedys = the three members of

2310-443: Is the performance–grammar correspondence hypothesis by John A. Hawkins , who suggests that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Cross-linguistic tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Some languages, however, exhibit regular inefficient patterning such as

2387-542: Is the study of syntax within the overarching framework of generative grammar . Generative theories of syntax typically propose analyses of grammatical patterns using formal tools such as phrase structure grammars augmented with additional operations such as syntactic movement . Their goal in analyzing a particular language is to specify rules which generate all and only the expressions which are well-formed in that language. In doing so, they seek to identify innate domain-specific principles of linguistic cognition, in line with

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2464-559: Is used to refer to that entity ( Africa ; Jupiter ; Sarah ; Walmart ) as distinguished from a common noun , which is a noun that refers to a class of entities ( continent, planet, person, corporation ) and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class (a continent , another planet , these persons , our corporation ). Some proper nouns occur in plural form (optionally or exclusively), and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique (the Hendersons ,

2541-488: Is usually an association between proper names and capitalization . In German, all nouns are capitalized, but other words are also capitalized in proper names (not including composition titles), for instance: der Große Bär (the Great Bear, Ursa Major ). For proper names, as for several other kinds of words and phrases, the details are complex, and vary sharply from language to language. For example, expressions for days of

2618-697: The Everglades , the Azores , the Pleiades ). Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns (the Mozart experience; his Azores adventure), or in the role of common nouns (he's no Pavarotti ; a few would-be Napoleons ). The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention. A distinction is normally made in current linguistics between proper nouns and proper names . By this strict distinction, because

2695-584: The Bill of Rights (1789) capitalizes a few common nouns but not most of them; and the Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment (1865) capitalizes only proper nouns. In Danish , from the 17th century until the orthographic reform of 1948, all nouns were capitalized. In modern English orthography , it is the norm for recognized proper names to be capitalized. The few clear exceptions include summer and winter (contrast July and Christmas ). It

2772-694: The Devanagari script, along with many other languages using alphabetic or syllabic scripts, do not distinguish upper and lower case and do not mark proper names systematically. There is evidence from brain disorders such as aphasia that proper names and common names are processed differently by the brain. There also appear to be differences in language acquisition. Although Japanese does not distinguish overtly between common and proper nouns, two-year-old children learning Japanese distinguished between names for categories of object (equivalent to common names) and names of individuals (equivalent to proper names): When

2849-495: The Grammaire générale . ) Syntactic categories were identified with logical ones, and all sentences were analyzed in terms of "subject – copula – predicate". Initially, that view was adopted even by the early comparative linguists such as Franz Bopp . The central role of syntax within theoretical linguistics became clear only in the 20th century, which could reasonably be called the "century of syntactic theory" as far as linguistics

2926-399: The speech act a sentence performs, some researchers have posited force phrases (ForceP), whose heads are not pronounced in many languages including English. Similarly, many frameworks assume that covert determiners are present in bare noun phrases such as proper names . Another type is the inflectional phrase , where (for example) a finite verb phrase is taken to be the complement of

3003-608: The Abrahamic deity (God). For some such words, capitalization is optional or dependent on context: northerner or Northerner ; aboriginal trees but Aboriginal land rights in Australia . When the comes at the start of a proper name, as in the White House , it is not normally capitalized unless it is a formal part of a title (of a book, film, or other artistic creation, as in The Keys to

3080-562: The Himalayas ), and collections of islands (e.g., the Hebrides ). However, if adjectives are used, they are placed after the definite article (e.g., "the mighty Yangtze"). When such proper nouns are grouped together, sometimes only a single definite article will be used at the head (e.g., " the Nile, Congo, and Niger"). And in certain contexts, it is grammatically permissible or even mandatory to drop

3157-552: The Kennedy family ) and metaphor (for instance, the new Gandhi , likening a person to Mahatma Gandhi). Current linguistics makes a distinction between proper nouns and proper names but this distinction is not universally observed and sometimes it is observed but not rigorously. When the distinction is made, proper nouns are limited to single words only (possibly with the ), while proper names include all proper nouns (in their primary applications) as well as noun phrases such as

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3234-505: The Kingdom ). Nouns and noun phrases that are not proper may be uniformly capitalized to indicate that they are definitive and regimented in their application (compare brand names, discussed below). For example, Mountain Bluebird does not identify a unique individual, and it is not a proper name but a so-called common name (somewhat misleadingly, because this is not intended as a contrast with

3311-856: The Mediterranean , the Thames ), buildings (e.g., the Parthenon ), institutions (e.g., the House of Commons ), cities and districts (e.g., The Hague , the Bronx ), works of literature (e.g., the Bible ), newspapers and magazines (e.g., The Times , The Economist , the New Statesman ), and events (e.g., the '45 , the Holocaust ). Plural proper names take the definite article. Such plural proper names include mountain ranges (e.g.,

3388-543: The United Kingdom , North Carolina , Royal Air Force , and the White House . Proper names can have a common noun or a proper noun as their head ; the United Kingdom , for example, is a proper name with the common noun kingdom as its head, and North Carolina is headed by the proper noun Carolina . Especially as titles of works, but also as nicknames and the like, some proper names contain no noun and are not formed as noun phrases (the film Being There ; Hi De Ho as

3465-444: The VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions, but there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. More recently, it is suggested that the left- versus right-branching patterns are cross-linguistically related only to the place of role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), which links the phenomena with

3542-584: The article the , as in the Netherlands , the Roaring Forties , or the Rolling Stones . A proper name may appear to have a descriptive meaning, even though it does not (the Rolling Stones are not stones and do not roll; a woman named Rose is not a flower). If it once had a descriptive meaning, it may no longer be descriptive. For example, a location previously referred to as "the new town" may now have

3619-449: The article. The definite article is not used in the presence of preceding possessives (e.g., " Da Vinci's Mona Lisa", " our United Kingdom"), demonstratives (e.g., "life in these United States", " that spectacular Alhambra"), interrogatives (e.g., " whose Mediterranean: Rome's or Carthage's"), or words like "no" or "another" (e.g., "that dump is no Taj Mahal", "neo-Nazis want another Holocaust"). An indefinite article phrase voids

3696-453: The common noun may determine the kind of entity, and a modifier determines the unique entity itself. For example: Proper nouns, and all proper names, differ from common nouns grammatically in English. They may take titles, such as Mr Harris or Senator Harris . Otherwise, they normally only take modifiers that add emotive coloring, such as old Mrs Fletcher, poor Charles , or historic York ; in

3773-492: The definite article. Grammarians divide over whether the definite article becomes part of the proper name in these cases, or is preceding the proper name. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language terms these weak proper names , in contrast with the more typical strong proper names , which are normally used without an article. Entities with proper names that use the definite article include geographical features (e.g.,

3850-504: The framework of generative grammar, which holds that syntax depends on a genetic endowment common to the human species. In that framework and in others, linguistic typology and universals have been primary explicanda. Alternative explanations, such as those by functional linguists , have been sought in language processing . It is suggested that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right- or left- branching but not mixed. The most-widely held approach

3927-401: The generative paradigm are: The Cognitive Linguistics framework stems from generative grammar but adheres to evolutionary , rather than Chomskyan , linguistics. Cognitive models often recognise the generative assumption that the object belongs to the verb phrase. Cognitive frameworks include the following: Proper name A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and

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4004-562: The head may be understood to cover for the others (e.g., " the Germany of Hitler, British Empire of Churchill, United States of Roosevelt, and Soviet Union of Stalin"). Headlines, which often simplify grammar for space or punchiness, frequently omit both definite and indefinite articles. Maps will typically include definite articles in the title, but omit them from the map image itself (e.g., Maldives, Sahara, Arctic Ocean, Andes, Elbe); however, exceptions may be made (e.g., The Wash, The Gambia). It

4081-456: The human mind . Other linguists (e.g., Gerald Gazdar ) take a more Platonistic view since they regard syntax to be the study of an abstract formal system . Yet others (e.g., Joseph Greenberg ) consider syntax a taxonomical device to reach broad generalizations across languages. Syntacticians have attempted to explain the causes of word-order variation within individual languages and cross-linguistically. Much of such work has been done within

4158-443: The initial element, though with many exceptions. European alphabetic scripts only developed a distinction between upper case and lower case in medieval times so in the alphabetic scripts of ancient Greek and Latin proper names were not systematically marked. They are marked with modern capitalization, however, in many modern editions of ancient texts. In past centuries, orthographic practices in English varied widely. Capitalization

4235-423: The left (indicated by \) for an NP (the element on the left) and outputs a sentence (the element on the right)." Thus, the syntactic category for an intransitive verb is a complex formula representing the fact that the verb acts as a function word requiring an NP as an input and produces a sentence level structure as an output. The complex category is notated as (NP\S) instead of V. The category of transitive verb

4312-417: The nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning ( semantics ). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals. The word syntax comes from Ancient Greek roots: σύνταξις "coordination", which consists of σύν syn , "together", and τάξις táxis , "ordering". The field of syntax contains a number of various topics that

4389-487: The need for a constituent of the sentence to be marked as the topic or focus . Theories of syntax differ in what they regard as a phrase. For instance, while most if not all theories of syntax acknowledge the existence of verb phrases (VPs), Phrase structure grammars acknowledge both finite verb phrases and non-finite verb phrases while dependency grammars only acknowledge non-finite verb phrases. The split between these views persists due to conflicting results from

4466-404: The non-finite VP string nominate Newt to be a constituent. Syntax In linguistics , syntax ( / ˈ s ɪ n t æ k s / SIN -taks ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences . Central concerns of syntax include word order , grammatical relations , hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency ), agreement ,

4543-498: The ordered elements. Another description of a language considers the set of possible grammatical relations in a language or in general and how they behave in relation to one another in the morphosyntactic alignment of the language. The description of grammatical relations can also reflect transitivity, passivization , and head-dependent-marking or other agreement. Languages have different criteria for grammatical relations. For example, subjecthood criteria may have implications for how

4620-476: The place of that division, he positioned the verb as the root of all clause structure. Categorial grammar is an approach in which constituents combine as function and argument , according to combinatory possibilities specified in their syntactic categories . For example, other approaches might posit a rule that combines a noun phrase (NP) and a verb phrase (VP), but CG would posit a syntactic category NP and another NP\S , read as "a category that searches to

4697-482: The proper name Newtown though it is no longer new and is now a city rather than a town. In English and many other languages, proper names and words derived from them are associated with capitalization, but the details are complex and vary from language to language (French lundi , Canada , un homme canadien , un Canadien ; English Monday , Canada , a Canadian man , a Canadian ; Italian lunedì , Canada , un uomo canadese , un canadese ). The study of proper names

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4774-540: The same type. The Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini , from c.  4th century BC in Ancient India , is often cited as an example of a premodern work that approaches the sophistication of a modern syntactic theory since works on grammar had been written long before modern syntax came about. In the West, the school of thought that came to be known as "traditional grammar" began with the work of Dionysius Thrax . For centuries,

4851-453: The semantic mapping of sentences. Dependency grammar is an approach to sentence structure in which syntactic units are arranged according to the dependency relation, as opposed to the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars . Dependencies are directed links between words. The (finite) verb is seen as the root of all clause structure and all the other words in the clause are either directly or indirectly dependent on this root (i.e.

4928-465: The sheer diversity of human language and to question fundamental assumptions about the relationship between language and logic. It became apparent that there was no such thing as the most natural way to express a thought and so logic could no longer be relied upon as a basis for studying the structure of language. The Port-Royal grammar modeled the study of syntax upon that of logic. (Indeed, large parts of Port-Royal Logic were copied or adapted from

5005-434: The standard empirical diagnostics of phrasehood such as constituency tests . The distinction is illustrated with the following examples: The syntax trees of this sentence are next: The constituency tree on the left shows the finite verb string may nominate Newt as a constituent; it corresponds to VP 1 . In contrast, this same string is not shown as a phrase in the dependency tree on the right. However, both trees, take

5082-411: The street , end of the street , and the end . More analysis, including about the plausibilities of both grammars, can be made empirically by applying constituency tests . In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a head , which identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase; for example, a phrase whose head

5159-410: The subject first, either in the sequence SVO or the sequence SOV . The other possible sequences are VSO , VOS , OVS , and OSV , the last three of which are rare. In most generative theories of syntax, the surface differences arise from a more complex clausal phrase structure, and each order may be compatible with multiple derivations. However, word order can also reflect the semantics or function of

5236-574: The subject is referred to from a relative clause or coreferential with an element in an infinite clause. Constituency is the feature of being a constituent and how words can work together to form a constituent (or phrase ). Constituents are often moved as units, and the constituent can be the domain of agreement. Some languages allow discontinuous phrases in which words belonging to the same constituent are not immediately adjacent but are broken up by other constituents. Constituents may be recursive , as they may consist of other constituents, potentially of

5313-487: The term noun is used for a class of single words ( tree , beauty ), only single-word proper names are proper nouns: Peter and Africa are both proper names and proper nouns; but Peter the Great and South Africa , while they are proper names, are not proper nouns (though they could be said to function as proper noun phrases ). The term common name is not much used to contrast with proper name , but some linguists have used

5390-430: The term proper name ). Such capitalization indicates that the term is a conventional designation for exactly that species ( Sialia currucoides ), not for just any bluebird that happens to live in the mountains. Words or phrases derived from proper names are generally capitalized, even when they are not themselves proper names. For example, Londoner is capitalized because it derives from the proper name London , but it

5467-410: The term for that purpose. Sometimes proper names are called simply names , but that term is often used more broadly. Words derived from proper names are sometimes called proper adjectives (or proper adverbs , and so on), but not in mainstream linguistic theory. Not every noun or a noun phrase that refers to a unique entity is a proper name. Chastity, for instance, is a common noun, even if chastity

5544-408: The tree on the right is of the dependency grammar . The node labels in the two trees mark the syntactic category of the different constituents , or word elements, of the sentence. In the constituency tree each phrase is marked by a phrasal node (NP, PP, VP); and there are eight phrases identified by phrase structure analysis in the example sentence. On the other hand, the dependency tree identifies

5621-550: The use of the definite article (e.g., " a restored Sistine Chapel", " a Philippines free from colonial masters"). The definite article is omitted when such a proper noun is used attributively (e.g., " Hague residents are concerned ...", "... eight pints of Thames water ..."). If a definite article is present, it is for the noun, not the attributive (e.g., " the Amazon jungle ", " the Bay of Pigs debacle "). Vocative phrases that address

5698-414: The verb). Some prominent dependency-based theories of syntax are the following: Lucien Tesnière (1893–1954) is widely seen as the father of modern dependency-based theories of syntax and grammar. He argued strongly against the binary division of the clause into subject and predicate that is associated with the grammars of his day (S → NP VP) and remains at the core of most phrase structure grammars. In

5775-659: The week and months of the year are capitalized in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish, or Finnish, though they may be understood as proper names in all of these. Languages differ in whether most elements of multiword proper names are capitalized (American English has House of Representatives , in which lexical words are capitalized) or only the initial element (as in Slovenian Državni zbor , "National Assembly"). In Czech , multiword settlement names are capitalized throughout, but non-settlement names are only capitalized in

5852-511: The wider goals of the generative enterprise. Generative syntax is among the approaches that adopt the principle of the autonomy of syntax by assuming that meaning and communicative intent is determined by the syntax, rather than the other way around. Generative syntax was proposed in the late 1950s by Noam Chomsky , building on earlier work by Zellig Harris , Louis Hjelmslev , and others. Since then, numerous theories have been proposed under its umbrella: Other theories that find their origin in

5929-553: Was much less standardized than today. Documents from the 18th century show some writers capitalizing all nouns, and others capitalizing certain nouns based on varying ideas of their importance in the discussion. Historical documents from the early United States show some examples of this process: the end (but not the beginning) of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and all of the Constitution (1787) show nearly all nouns capitalized;

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