One of the most important ways to discover why and how sentences must be structured is by specifically stating the structural properties of the language
Akmajian, et.al, 2010: 154. This study aims to discover the compositional structure of a noun phrase. Therefore, belows are the definitions of the theories of
noun, phrase, and noun phrase:
a. Noun
According to Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik, nouns have certain characteristics that differentiate them from other word-classes 1974: 127. They
mention that for semantic and grammatical reasons, nouns can have several types such as proper noun e.g. John, Paris, and Mississippi, common noun e.g. bottle,
cake, and bread, count noun e.g. apple, car, and egg, and mass noun e.g. bread, experience, and beauty.
Count noun is the kind of noun that can be distinguished as separable entities or basically, it can be counted e.g. one pig, two pigs, several pigs, . . ..
Whereas mass noun is seen as continuous entities that cannot be counted because of the continuity e.g. much pork, much information Quirk, et.al, 1974: 130.
Therefore, mass nouns are also usually called as non-count nouns. Since the mass noun is continuous entities and unable to be counted, it has no plural form as in
countable nouns with –s and –es. In some cases, a noun can be categorized to be in
two classes at the same time such as count noun or mass noun yet they have certain differences in meaning 1974: 129. For example, there is a distinction of meaning
of the noun lambs as in the sentence “I see the two little lambs” and “I eat New
Zealand lamb”. The word lambs in the first sentence refers to a count noun that
means animal whereas the word lamb in the second sentence refers to a mass noun that means meat of lamb.
b. Phrase
Radford 2004: 1 states that “phrases and sentences are built up of a series
of constituents i.e. syntactic units, each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function
.” In order to be able to analyze the syntactic units of a certain type of sentence or phrase, the
identification of each of the constituents in the sentence or phrase. For example, in a sentence “Clare sings beautifully”, it can be understood that each of the three
words in the sentence have its own specific grammatical category Clare being a singular noun, sings being a present tense verb, and beautifully being an adverb
and grammatical function Clare as a subject, sings as a predicate, and beautifully as an adjunct.
In a phrase there must be a head word that determines the type of the phrase such as the expression students of Philosophy is a plural noun phrase because the
head of the phrase is the plural noun students. The plural noun students is the head instead of the noun Philosophy because the phrase students of Philosophy denotes
the kinds of student, not kinds of Philosophy 2004: 1.
c. Noun Phrase
