Syntactic Categories

Two words or phrases are in the same syntactic categories if and only if you can interchange them every sentence without making the sentence ungrammatical.

Common Syntactic Categories and Phrases

• Noun Phrases (NP):
  • Take determiners (the, a, his, few, some, most, this) as specifiers.
  • Modified by AdjPs, PPs, AdvPs, and NPs.
  • May consist of a single pronoun (Pro).
• Verb Phrases (VP):
  • Take NP as complements, depending on the transitivity:
    • Intransitive: takes only a subject (sleeps, eats).
    • Transitive: takes a subject and direct object (hit, smokes).
    • Ditransitive: takes a subject, direct object and indirect object (gave).
  • Modified by AdvP, PP, and NP of time.
• Adjective phrases (AdjP): Take qualifiers (very, quite, a little) as specifiers answering “how.”
• Prepositional Phrases (PP): Take NP as complement (into the room), qualifiers as specifiers (straight onto the bed).
• Adverb Phrases (AdvP): Take qualifiers (very, too) as specifiers.
• Conjunctions (Conj): Combines two phrases of the same type (XP + XP -> XP). (e.g., for, and, nor, but, or, yet, although)
• Determiners (Det): Articles (a, the), possessives (my, his), quantifiers (few, some, every), demonstratives (this, those).
• Complementizer Phrases (CP): Complementizer C (that, if, whether) takes a TP complement.
  • VPs can take CPs as object complements (know that you are watching), or CPs can serve as subjects.