The phrase in the hierarchy of language units Contents Introduction

The phrase in the hierarchy of language units
Contents
Introduction
Chapter I. what is The hierarchy of units
1.1 the highest unit in the grammatical hierarchy
1.2 a hierarchy of linguistic units
Chapter II. The role of sentences in several ways
2.1 The important of a hierarchical analysis of sentences
Conclusion
List of used literature

Introduction
This research paper illustrates the point that a hierarchical study makes clear the difference
between units such as sentence, clause, group, word and morpheme. It also explains the different
types of sentences on the basis of their structure and purpose. Mention has also been made of the
clause and its different types. A text-analysis, in terms of grammatical units has been made. Sentences are the hierarchal structure of combined phrases. When constructing a sentence, two types of phrases are always necessary: Noun Phrase (NP) and Verb Phrase (VP), forming the simplest possible sentence. What determines whether a sentence is grammatically constructed (i.e. the sentence makes sense to a native speaker of the language), is its adherence to the language's phrase structure rules, allowing a language to generate large numbers of sentences. Languages cross-linguistically differ in their phrase structure rules, resulting in the difference of order of the NP and VP, and other phrases included in a sentence. Languages which do have the similar phrase structure rules, however, will translate so that a sentence from one language will be grammatical when translated into the target language.
French example:
Sentence: "Le chien a aimé la fille" (translation: "The dog loved the girl").The French sentence directly translates to English, demonstrating that the phrase structures of both languages are very similar.
This diagram demonstrates how two phrases combine to form a sentence. In this case, it is both a noun phrase and a verb phrase
Verb phrase
The idea that words combine to form phrases. For example, the word “the” combines with word “dog” to form the phrase “the dog”. A phrase is a sequence of words or a group of words arranged in a grammatical way to combine and form a sentence. There are five commonly occurring types of phrases; Noun phrases (NP), Adjective phrases (AdjP), Verb phrases (VP), Adverb Phrases (AdvP), and Prepositional Phrases (PP).
Hierarchical combinations of words in their formation of phrasal categories are apparent cross-linguistically- for example, in French:
French examples:
Noun phrase: "Le chien" (translation: "The dog")
Verb phrase: " a aimé la fille" (translation: "loved the girl")
Full sentence: "Le chien a aimé la fille"
Noun phraseEdit
A noun phrase refers to a phrase that is built upon a noun. For example, “ The dog” or “the girl” in the sentence “the dog loved the girl” act as noun phrases.
Verb phraseEdit
Verb phrase refers to a phrase that is composed of at least one main verb and one or more helping/auxiliary verb (every sentence needs at least one main verb). For example, the word “loved the girl” in the sentence “the dog loved the girl” acts as a verb phrase.see also Adjective phrases (AdjP), Adverb phrases (AdvP), and Prepositional phrases (PP)
Phrase structure rulesEdit
A diagram which demonstrates how phrase structure rules take syntactic categories and create phrases A phrase structure tree shows that a sentence is both linear string of words and a hierarchical structure with phrases nested in phrases (combination of phrase structures).A phrase structure tree is a formal device for representing speaker’s knowledge about phrase structure in speech.
The syntactic category of each individual word appears immediately above that word. In this way, “the” is shown to be a determiner, “child” is a noun, and so on.
The subdomain that deals with words is morphology, which states that words are made up of morphemes which combine in a regular and rule-governed fashion.
For example, the word 'national' is made up of two morphemes 'nation' which is a noun and '-al' which is a suffix that means pertaining to, this meaning helps us in categorizing '-al' as an adjective. These categories aid in arranging the morphemes so they can combine in a way that will form the word 'national,’ which is an adjective.
Morphology states that words come in categories, and the morphemes that join together to create the word assign the category. The two main categories are open class, where new words can be created and closed class where there is a limited number of members. Within both of these categories there are further sub-categories.Open class includes: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and closed class includes: prepositions, determiners, numerals, complementizers, auxiliaries, modals, coordinators, and negation/affirmation. These sub categories can be further broken down for example, verbs can be either transitive or intransitive. These categories can be identified with semantic criteria about what a word means, for instance nouns are said to be people, places, or things while verbs are actions. Words are all placed in these categories and depending on their category they follow specific rules that determine their word order.
Cross-Linguistically other languages form words similarly to English. This is done by having morphemes of different categories combine in a rule governed fashion in order to create the word.