English and Vietnamese noun phrases Running head: english and vietnamese noun phrase

According to L. H. Nguyen (2004), a noun phrase is a group of words with a noun or pronoun as a main part (the head). The noun may only consist of a one word as in (a) or it may be long and complex as in (b)

1. 
   Lan, Hoa
   
2. 
   The cats that I bought yesterday.
   

The functional formula of a English noun phrase may be consist of 4 following elements in this order: Determiner – Pre modification- Head noun- Post modification

1. 
   Determiner: “Noun rarely stand alone, they are usually accompanied by modifiers. The most common noun modifier in English is determiners” (Berk, 1990) which determine the reference of the noun phrase in its linguistic or situational context. A determiner is an optional element in a noun phrase that occurs at the front most position in a noun phrase. Depending on their relative position before a noun, we distinguish three classes of determiners. Pre determiner, Central Determiner, Post determiner.
   

[Pre-central-post- Noun]

1. 
   Central determiners: Central determiners include a number of different kinds of word: articles (a, an, the), possessives or genitives (his, her, your), demonstratives (this, that, these, those), interrogatives (which, what).They are initial positions in a noun phrase (if there is no pre determiner) and occupy the same position in a noun phrase. Those determiners always precede both the noun and any adjective. Moreover, they indicate the kind of reference which the nouns have. For example,