Phrase Structure: Verb, Inflection, Determiner, and Complementizer Phrases

Beyond the basic terms, a handful of phrase types recur throughout the syntactic literature. A phrase is a unit that acts together in the syntax, and these units come in two broad kinds: lexical phrases, built on lexical morphemes, and functional (or grammatical) phrases, built on functional morphemes that contribute logical meanings and take lexical items as arguments. The verb phrase is lexical; the inflectional, determiner, and complementizer phrases are functional.

The verb phrase (VP)

The verb phrase is written with a lowercase v deliberately: little v is the categorizer, the element that takes a root and turns it into a verb. The verb phrase is the lexical projection that forms the core of a clause and specifies which arguments are necessary to complete the thought of the predicate.

Hale and Keyser (2002) open with a revealing contrast: the pot broke and the engine coughed are both intransitive, yet the pot broke alternates with I broke the pot, while the engine coughed cannot become I coughed the engine. The standard analysis is that the pot broke is an unaccusative — its single argument, the pot, is internal to the verb phrase — whereas cough is an unergative, whose single argument is introduced outside the verb phrase. Voice is what introduces the external argument: active voice adds the agent I to break, yielding two arguments, but with cough, which has no argument of its own, voice supplies the only argument, so just one remains. The same surface pattern thus hides two different underlying structures, which is why the full range of a verb's uses must be examined to determine its structure.

Derived words carry this over. In the examination of the student driver lasted one hour (an example associated with Grimshaw), the nominalization examination retains the argument of the verb examine: of the student driver is the very argument seen in the doctor examined the student driver. Complex words can inherit the argument structure of the pieces that build them.

The inflectional phrase (IP)

The inflectional phrase, also called the tense phrase (TP), is the functional projection that takes a VP as an argument in order to anchor the event or state in time. Once the type of event is fixed, tense, aspect, and modal markers locate it. English is exceptionally rich here — he might have been being seen stacks auxiliary upon auxiliary — and the stacking reveals a layered order: voice (passive), then progressive, then perfect, then a modal such as might, then tense (T).

That order appears to be logical and largely universal. Aspect sits lower than tense, meaning the verb combines with aspect before tense or modality. Greek confirms this: its aspectual system (imperfective, perfective, perfect) attaches to the verb before tense, and tenseless verbs still carry aspect — seen in the infinitive, subjunctive, and participle. Tense is the last functional category to combine with the verb. One further consequence is structural rather than semantic: the subject sits in the specifier of TP/IP, and word order depends on whether the verb moves past that position.

The determiner phrase (DP)

If the inflectional phrase is about verbs, the determiner phrase is about nouns. It is the functional projection that takes a noun phrase as an argument to anchor the noun in the discourse. English has a rich inventory: articles (the, a), demonstratives (this, that), quantifiers (some, all), and numbers, each needing an ordered slot — the three cats shows number standing between the and the noun.

Greek articulates these categories even more richly. In Luke 10:36, where English says "who of these three?", Greek layers a demonstrative, a definite article, a number, and an implicit noun — literally "these the three (people)." English cannot do this: using these forces dropping the, because the two are in complementary distribution, competing for one slot. In Greek the demonstrative and article co-occur, so they occupy different slots. A hallmark of DPs is that they can serve as arguments of verbs; indeed his stuffed animal and Ezra are both DPs. This is because nouns need a determiner to refer: bare cat cannot be an argument (cat walks fails), whereas a cat, the cat, or two cats can. Allowing nouns to refer is the DP's central function.

The complementizer phrase (CP)

The complementizer phrase is the functional projection that takes an inflectional phrase as an argument. Since the IP already yields a complete, tense-anchored thought, the CP is where that thought can be turned into a question, a wish, or a subordinate clause. Questioning moves an element to the front: in What did Ezra give to a child?, what stands in for the thing given and appears at the start, flipping the normal word order. The optative works similarly — May Ezra give his stuffed animal to a child places the auxiliary first to express a wish.

Everything above the tense phrase is the left periphery. Cowper and DeCaen map the left periphery of biblical Hebrew as hosting topic, focus, wh-words, casus pendens, and more — all able to affect clause order. A complementizer introduces a complement clause: that in "I knew that he would come" links a complete thought to another verb, and Hebrew ki and asher do the same, taking a full TP after them. This explains the Hebrew wayyiqtol and weqatal forms, which cannot be subordinated: their complementary distribution with ki and asher shows they occupy the complementizer slot, having moved from V to C, past the subject. Such forms are evidence not for basic verb–subject or subject–verb order but for movement of particular verb forms to a higher position, driven by meanings like topic, focus, or questioning.