Functions in Phrases

The syntactic functions which we looked at in the last section -- Subject, Object, Predicate, Adjunct, etc -- are all functions within sentences or clauses. We saw, for instance, that most sentences can be divided into two main functional constituents, the Subject and the Predicate:

Subject	Predicate
[1] The lion	roared
[2] He	writes well
[3] She	enjoys going to the cinema
[4] The girl in the blue dress	arrived late

Within the Predicate, too, constituents perform various functions -- in [3], for example, going to the cinema performs the function of Direct Object, while in [4], late performs the function of Adjunct. In each of these cases, we are referring to the roles which these constituents perform in the sentence or clause.

We can also assign functions to the constituents of a phrase. Recall that we have said that all phrases have the following generalised structure:

(pre-Head string) --- Head --- (post-Head string)

where the parentheses denote optional elements.

In this section, we will consider the functions of these parts of a phrase -- what roles do they perform in the phrase as a whole?

We will begin by looking at functions within verb phrases.

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