Syntactic categories

In grammar, a phrase called an expression in some contexts is a group of one or more words acting as a grammatical unit. This means that a phrase can be treated as a unit within a larger structure. For instance, the English sentence "the squirrel is very happy" is a clause phrase which contains the noun phrase "the squirrel" and the verb phrase "is very happy". Additionally, "very happy" is an adjective phrase. Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a constituent. There is a dif

In language, a clause is a constituent or phrase that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with or without any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes unexpressed if it is easily deducible from the context, especially in null-subject languages but also in other languages, including instances of the imperative mood in English.

optional element in phrase structure or clause structure

In natural language, a determiner, also called a determinative (abbreviated ''''), is a word or affix that combines with a noun to express its reference. Examples in English include articles (the and a/an), demonstratives (this, that), possessive determiners (my, their), and quantifiers (many, both''). Not all languages have determiners, and not all systems of grammatical description recognize them as a distinct category.

phrase the head of which is a noun

shortened version of a word, syllable or word group

phrase the head of which is a verb

In linguistics, a causative (abbreviated ) is a valency-increasing operation that indicates that a subject either causes someone or something else to do or be something or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event. Normally, it brings in a new argument (the causer), A, into a transitive clause, with the original subject S becoming the object O.

in generative grammar, the theory of syntactic category formation that ① phrases may contain intermediate constituents projected from a head X; and that ② this system of projected constituency may be common to more than one category (e.g. N, V, A, P)

a phrase the head of which is an adjective

a phrase the head of which is an adverb

term in grammar

phrase the head of which is an adposition

rewrite rule used to describe a given language's syntax, used to break down a natural language sentence into its syntactic categories (both lexical and phrasal); used in transformational grammar; first proposed by Noam Chomsky in 1957

In linguistics (especially generative grammar), a complementizer or complementiser (glossing abbreviation: ) is a functional category (part of speech) that includes those words that can be used to turn a clause into the subject or object of a sentence. For example, the word that may be called a complementizer in English sentences like Mary believes that it is raining. The concept of complementizers is specific to certain modern grammatical theories. In traditional grammar, such words are normally considered conjunctions. The standard abbreviation for complementizer is C.