noun phrase (NP)

A word group with a noun or pronoun as its head. The noun head can be accompanied by modifiers, determiners (such as the, a, her), and/or complements.

A noun phrase (often abbreviated as NP) most commonly functions as a subject, object, or complement.

See also:

• Adjective Phrase
• Nominal
• Noun Clause

Examples and Observations:

• "The only white people who came to our house were welfare workers and bill collectors."
  (James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955)



• "McSorley's bar is short, accommodating approximately ten elbows, and is shored up with iron pipes."
  (Joseph Mitchell, "The Old House at Home," 1940)



• "The wells and water table had been polluted by chemical pesticides and fertilizers that leached into the earth and were washed by rain into the creeks, where the stunned fish were scavenged by the ospreys."
  (Peter Matthiessen, Men's Lives, 1986)



• "More than one determiner can introduce a noun phrase; for example, all and our in [2]:

  [2] In the initial sorties all our aircraft have returned safely [S2B-008-15]

  " . . . A noun head may also have more than one postmodifier. Two postmodifiers are exhibited in [3]:

  [3] [. . .] I think it is a pity that LB is the only major corporation I have worked for where this has been a problem. [W1B-020-24]

  The noun head is corporation and the two postmodifiers are I have worked for and where this has been a problem. The second postmodifier modifies the whole of the preceding noun phrase, including the first postmodifier, since clearly the writer does not want to generalize by extending the reference to major corporations where he has not worked. On the other hand, the two postmodifiers in [4] modify the head separately:

  [4] [ . . .] we could not trace the invoice dated 22nd March 1990 for £43.13. [W1B-021-37]

  We could reverse the order of the postmodifiers without changing the meaning."
  (Sidney Greenbaum, Oxford English Grammar. Oxford Univ. Press, 1996)



• A Georgia woman was jailed briefly after a run-in with courthouse security over her refusal to remove a religious head scarf.



• "The men in the class--there were a few older students, veterans--listened with good-natured interest, and the girls gazed at the instructor with rosy-faced, shy affection."
  (Bernard Malamud, A New Life, 1961)



• "Your type really makes me puke, you vacuous, toffy-nosed, malodorous pervert!"
  (Graham Chapman in "The Argument Clinic," Monty Python's Flying Circus)



• "Some of the owners of Harlem clubs, delighted at the flood of white patronage, made the grievous error of barring their own race, after the manner of the famous Cotton Club."
  (Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 1940)



• "Most forms of controlled English suggest revising noun phrases that are more than three words long. However, even a two- or three-word noun phrase can be unclear or ambiguous. For example, in the following sentences, someone who is not familiar with the subject matter cannot fully understand the two-word noun phrases, because each individual word has multiple possible meanings:
  
  • If you haven't imported a filter, the default is a unity gain.
  
  
  • The tracking loop mitigates the effects of multi-path interference on code-phase errors.
  On the other hand, some longer noun phrases are easy to comprehend--especially if part of the noun phrase is a proper noun. As long as the reader understands the two-word noun phrase dialog box, the four-word noun phrase in the following sentence is comprehensible:

  In the Advanced Options dialog box, use the arrows to adjust the percentage.

  " . . . Clearly it is important to keep noun phrases as short as possible in English. But even the short ones often need to be explained or defined in order for translators to be sure about their meanings."
  (John R. Kohl, The Global English Style Guide: Writing Clear, Translatable Documentation for a Global Market. SAS, 2008)