We have already looked a bit at what nouns are and at some of their properties. Noun phrases can be extremely complex. In this chapter, we will explore some fundamentals of how noun phrases are structured. We won't cover everything. In particular, we’ll leave certain issues of complex layering, where the NP contains many different elements, to a later chapter.

We will start by looking more closely at nouns themselves. In the previous chapter, we discovered that there are different types of verbs, and that those verb types influenced the structure of the verb phrase. With nouns as well, there are different subtypes, and those types play a role in the structure of the noun phrase.