Noun phrases?!

[fluffyhamster]

Gordon Jarvie (in his Bloomsbury Grammar Guide, page 10) starts off about noun phrases well enough:

Noun phrases

A group of words centring on a noun is called a noun phrase. It can appear at the beginning, the middle or the end of a sentence, and as subject, object or complement. Noun phrases consist of the noun on its own or accompanied by other words that modify its meaning.

......................Headword...............Rest of sentence

.........................Trees...................live a long time.
.................Many trees...................live a long time.
..Most of the pine trees...................live a long time.
All the coniferous trees in that gully live a long time.

The noun phrases in the above examples are underlined. It will be noted that they can be extremely varied in their make-up.

But he surely goes off the rails somewhat with parts of the underlining in this next bit:

In the following extract, all the noun phrases are underlined:

When the rains stopped at Wimbledon yesterday evening, the grunting began, and Monica Seles, who reached the women's semi-finals here for the first time, was accused by her beaten opponent of putting her fellow players at a disadvantage when her grunting reaches a crescendo. Seles was called over by the umpire after the eighth game of the second set, and asked to keep the noise down. The crowd behind the umpire's chair cheered when the warning was issued.

[ouyang]

I would definitely make two minor changes. Separate the noun phrase that functions as an adverb.
Wimbledon yesterday evening

and the noun phrase in the other adverb phrase
her fellow players at a disadvantage

I don't agree that the dependent clause,
"who reached the women's semi-finals here for the first time" is an appositive of Monica Seles. It's a non-restrictive adjective clause in my opinion.

However, if you buy into the conventional wisdom that non-relative adjective clauses are appositives, then why not non-restrictive clauses, e.g. "The fact that he said it makes it true."

[fluffyhamster]

Hi Ouyang, how's it going?

I would definitely make two minor changes. Separate the noun phrase that functions as an adverb.
Wimbledon yesterday evening

and the noun phrase in the other adverb phrase
her fellow players at a disadvantage

Yes, totally. (Similar reasoning also applies to re-analyzing Jarvie's eleventh "noun phrase" thus: the umpire after the eighth game of the second set).

I'm assuming (hoping!) that the dodgier underlining here in the edition (first ~) I have is simply a printing mistake, and has been corrected in later editions, because it detracts from what otherwise appears to be a reasonably good book.

I don't agree that the dependent clause,
"who reached the women's semi-finals here for the first time" is an appositive of Monica Seles. It's a non-restrictive adjective clause in my opinion.

However, if you buy into the conventional wisdom that non-relative (I guess you mean non-restrictive? LOL - FH) adjective clauses are appositives, then why not non-restrictive clauses, e.g. "The fact that he said it makes it true."

I find 'adjective clause' a bit dated and little-used nowadays compared to 'relative clause'. Regarding apposition, again it's hard to know what was meant with the original underlining. Like you, I'm not 100% convinced about whether non-restrictive relative/adjectival clauses (or rather, "clauses", given that they IMHO lack a "noun proper" within themselves to "relativize to") can be considered appositive (even if e.g. Trask views 'appositive clauses' as 'Another name for a non-restrictive relative clause') - I mean, straight away the commas break up and separate things a bit too much - but on the other hand examples such as the 'Seles "appositive"' slot can be filled by a "clearer" appositive (e.g. Fred Bloggs-Perry, a British player who had never got even a wild card in previous years, this year incredibly finds himself playing in a Wimbledon semi-final*), so there seems to be some sort of rough functional equivalence at least (i.e. here both the noun phrase or clause can be omitted with little effect beyond the loss of the extra information they provide...but hey, I'm not claiming to know about "tests for appositiveness" or anything here!), and ELT (EFL, ESL, ESOL) usually calls more for fuzzy (functional-informal) fudging than not! As for your 'The fact that he said it makes it true', I suppose that the fact and the saying are the same thing (in fact , couldn't 'The fact' be omitted: That he said it made it true > He said it, which makes it true > He said it, which means it is true > He said it, so it's true etc), but the NP + (complementizer +) clause is a formal mismatch appositively-speaking IMHO, for reasons I've attempted to outline in some of the earlier of the preceding guff; but on the other hand (and similar to the later part of the preceding guff), the 'that he said it' could be omitted, at least in context: That fact (=that he has said it) makes it true. Anyway, there's some discussion on an old thread ( http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9497 ) about noun complement clauses versus relative clauses - topics which would seem connected to what we're on about here (I think! ).

*Obviously the relative anonymity of this F B-P makes it necessary to add as much information as possible i.e. ', a British player...' before and in addition to the rest of that NP, versus the relative fame of Seles, whose name can be "expanded upon" simply with a clause starting with ', who...'.