Conclusion to Word Groups

On the previous page we looked at this snippet as three simple word groups: Noun-Verb-Noun. But what if we want to model it more closely than that? 

It’s not a complex sentence, but we could break the first noun group into a noun group + a prepositional phrase:

By highlighting the snippet this way we are saying that the first noun group has a main noun ‘the greatest’ which is then qualified with the prepositional phrase ‘of these’—which means that this thing isn’t the greatest of all time, or in the universe, or whatever, but rather it’s the greatest ‘of these’.

But let’s quickly confirm this makes sense, because we’ve said many times that it is easy to get confused or misled when we are looking at prepositional phrases.

The phrase ‘of these’ is definitely a prepositional phrase, because:

• ‘Of’ is a preposition
• ‘These’ is a pronoun, which means it is a stand-in for another noun group—which in this snippet means standing in for the emotions ‘cold, fear, excitement’ (remember the fragment we worked on at the beginning of this lesson?) 

However, the phrase ‘the greatest’ is a little more ambiguous, because the word ‘greatest’ is usually an adjective: it is the most intense form—or what we call superlative—of the adjective ‘great’.

If the snippet had said, ‘the greatest emotion is fear’, the word ‘greatest’ would clearly be an adjective describing the noun ‘emotion’.

But if we write something like ‘the greatest is fear’ or 'the greatest of these is fear', then the word ‘greatest’ is functioning as a noun, because it is now not just describing the emotion, it actually represents it.

We’ll come back to this on the next page, because we can use this ambiguity to look at this noun group a slightly different way, but for the moment we can confirm that it makes sense to call ‘of these’ a prepositional phrase.

Phew!

If we look at the examples we wrote on the previous page, which ones match the new pattern?

Those two above can match the pattern.

These next two can't:

But if we changed them slightly:

Now they match the pattern.

Let’s write some variations. Here are the responses you wrote on the previous page.

If a response already matches the new pattern, highlight it to show how it matches. 

If it doesn’t match the new pattern, see if you can alter it to match. If small alterations don’t work, write a whole new response.