Editing Noun phrase (section)

==Status of single words as phrases==
Traditionally, a [[phrase]] is understood to contain two or more [[word]]s. The traditional progression in the size of syntactic units is ''word < phrase < [[clause]]'', and in this approach a single word (such as a noun or pronoun) would not be referred to as a phrase. However, many modern schools of syntax – especially those that have been influenced by [[X-bar theory]] – make no such restriction.<ref>For direct examples of approaches that obscure the distinction between nouns and pronouns on the one hand and noun phrases on the other, see for instance Matthews (1981:160f.) and (Lockwood (2002:3).</ref> Here many single words are judged to be phrases based on a desire for theory-internal consistency. A phrase is deemed to be a word or a combination of words that appears in a set syntactic position, for instance in subject position or object position.

On this understanding of phrases, the nouns and pronouns in bold in the following sentences are noun phrases (as well as nouns or pronouns):

::'''He''' saw '''someone'''.
::'''Milk''' is good.
::'''They''' spoke about '''corruption'''.

The words in bold are called phrases since they appear in the syntactic positions where multiple-word phrases (i.e. traditional phrases) can appear. This practice takes the constellation to be primitive rather than the words themselves. The word ''he'', for instance, functions as a pronoun, but within the sentence it also functions as a noun phrase. The [[phrase structure grammar]]s of the Chomskyan tradition ([[government and binding theory]] and the [[minimalist program]]) are primary examples of theories that apply this understanding of phrases. Other grammars such as [[dependency grammar]]s are likely to reject this approach to phrases, since they take the words themselves to be primitive. For them, phrases must contain two or more words.