Just as you know a lot about word categories without necessarily realizing that you do, you know a lot about combining words into phrases and phrases into sentences. As we talk about phrases and sentences, we'll be referring to many of the word categories you learned about in Part I, so check back there if you need to.
Let's start by taking a look at the following sentence:
The little boy laughed.
If you were asked to divide the sentence into two parts, what would the parts be? Speakers of English typically separate the sentence after the word boy:
2. The little boy + laughed.
Other groupings, like the ones below, generally seem unnatural to native speakers of English:
3. The + little boy laughed.
4. The little + boy laughed.
That is, we all sense that the little boy forms a unit and that laughed forms another unit. Units like these are called phrases.
So we can start off our discussion by suggesting that there are two parts to sentence. We could call them Part A and Part B, or Harry and George, but we'll use the terminology of modern linguistics and refer to them as the noun phrase and the verb phrase. The noun phrase in our sentence is the little boy; the verb phrase is laughed. Of course, there are other phrases as well. We'll look at the most common ones in the units of Part II.
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