Syntactic structure is deal with how words are grouped into a sentence. The beginning way to do that is has to combine each word into a phrase. Radford (2009: 39) stated that phrases and sentences are built up by a series of merger operations, each of which combines a pair of constituents together to form a larger constituent. Meanwhile, Miller (2002, 21) said “the term ‘phrase’ is applied to single words and to sequences of words. This reflects the view that a single noun such as sand occupies a slot in which a phrase could occur”. He also added that words are grouped into phrases and that groupings typically bring together heads and their modifiers. Head is that certain relationships hold between words whereby one word. It controls the other words. Modifier is one or more words modify the head of a phrase.
Base on the statement above, it can simply say that phrase is words are grouped that typically bring together heads and their modifiers, head close to the maintain of words while modifier is the followers of head.
The distinction between heads and modifiers has been put in terms of one word, the head controls the other words in a phrase, the modifiers. If we think of language as a way of conveying information which is what every speaker does with language some of the time we can consider the head as conveying a central piece of information and the modifiers as conveying extra information, for example:
- Expensive books
Thus in the phrase expensive books, the head word books indicates the very large set of things that count as books, while expensive indicates that the speaker is drawing attention not to the whole set but to the subset of books that are expensive. In the longer phrase the expensive books, the word the signals that the speaker is referring to a set of books which have already been mentioned or are otherwise obvious in a particular context.
reference:
reference:
- Carnie A. 2006. Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Victoria: Blackwell.
