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According To Tallerman Meaning

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1. [the chemistry teacher who cooks meth for a living] [[finally] told [his wife] [the truth]] 1.1 Syntactic categories [the chemistry teacher who cooks meth for a living], [his wife], and [the truth] are all noun phrases (NP). According to Tallerman (2015), by finding the word class of the head of a phrase, the word class of the whole phrase can be determined as they are the same. Also according to this author, the head determines the meaning of the whole phrase as it carries the semantic information and is generally obligatory, while other parts can be omitted (Tallerman, 2015). In the first phrase mentioned above, the word teacher carries the semantic meaning, and is therefore the head. You could replace the entire phrase by [the teacher], …show more content…

In the phrase [finally told his wife the truth], the word told bears the semantic meaning, it’s about the action of telling the wife the truth. The word finally is optional, as [told his wife the truth] is grammatical. His wife and the truth are complements of this verb; you usually tell something to someone. The phrase is therefore a verb phrase …show more content…

In all three cases, the word carrying the semantic meaning, the head, is a noun: viewers, Fring, or villain. All three can be used on their own with the possessive ‘s as in viewers’, Fring’s or villain’s and both viewer and villain can be used in combination with the to create complete phrases while Fring is a proper noun. [consider Fring an unlikely villain] is a verb phrase since the head of the phrase is the verb consider. 3.2 Grammatical functions [many viewers] is the subject of this clause. Indeed, when making a yes-no question, thus inverting the order between the subject and the verb, here a dummy auxiliary (Börjars & Burridge, 2010), it is this NP that moves: (15) Do many viewers consider Fring an unlikely villain? When replaced by a pronoun, the phrase also shows nominative case: (16) [They] consider Fring an unlikely villain. The noun phrase also agrees with the verb and is clause-initial. [consider Fring an unlikely villain] is the predicate as it is what is left of the sentence without the subject, non-optional, and a NP. [Fring] is a direct object of the verb consider. The noun phrase can be moved to the clause-initial position and become the subject of a passive

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