THE STRUCTURE OF THE NOUN PHRASE IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH
ABSTRACT
This study examines the structure of noun phrase in English and French. The main purpose of the study is guided by describing the differences in the structure of a noun phrase in English and French, creating analyses that will facilitate or enhance the research of the independent structures of these languages, exposing researchers to different problems that may arise in the structures of these languages. The study adopts a phrase structure/ structuralism framework. It finds out that the French Noun Phrase (Groupe de Nom) is head final. It was also discovered that certain part nominal constituent like the prepositional phrase and the subordinate clause can co-occur with the Noun phrase (Groupe de Nom) to the NP (GN. We discovered that the NP(GN)can occur as subject (subjet), object (objet) of the verb and complement of the preposition (complŐment de prŐposition). All the several thousands of words in human language belong to a highly restricted finite set of word level categories, such as noun (noms), verbs (verbes), objectives (objectifs),adverbs (adverbes), pronouns (pronoms) etc. In practice, it is also possible for the major words level categories to expand onto their corresponding phrase-level categories by the addition of other words. The resultant construction due to the addition of other words to expand a major word-level category is knonw as a phrase.