The Relationship Between Word Classes and Phrasal Categories

Phrasal categories in traditional studies increase because of the structural and semantic connection between the head and complements. However, the syntactic category of the head identifies the type of a phrasal category. The lexical classes which act as a head are nouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs and postpositions. Therefore, the phrasal categories are noun phrases, adjectival phrases, adverbial phrases, verb phrases and postpositional phrases. Modern linguistic studies evaluate phrasal categories differently. In modern linguistic studies, the essential part of the sentence is verb phrase. Verb phrase reflects lexical categories as well as grammatical relations (subject, object etc.). The arguments which belong to verb phrase express certain semantic roles. Moreover, according to modern linguistic approach, even one word is enough to constitute a phrasal category.

Keywords

Word classes, phrasal categories, grammatical relations, semantic roles.