Editing Phrase (section)

===Functional categories===
Some modern theories of syntax introduce [[functional category|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 (linguistics)|covert]]. For example, in order to explain certain syntactic patterns which correlate with 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 name]]s.

Another type is the [[inflectional phrase]], where (for example) a [[finite verb]] phrase is taken to be the complement of a functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to [[inflection|inflect]] – for [[agreement (grammar)|agreement]] with its subject (which is the [[Specifier (linguistics)|specifier]] of INFL), for [[grammatical tense|tense]] and [[grammatical aspect|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 the need for a constituent of the sentence to be marked as the [[topic (linguistics)|topic]] or [[focus (linguistics)|focus]].