_{Syntactic Theory}

General Grammatical Functions: Head, Complement, Modifier and Specifier

There are special names for the grammatical functions inside a clause. However, we can generalized these patterns to all syntactic categories. As a result, we will determine the grammatical function of each daughter in a syntactic tree.

We distinguish the following four (general) grammatical functions:

• The Head
• The Complement
• The Modifier
• The Specifier

Related exercises:

• determine grammatical functions

Related pages:

• For a more theory-oriented presentation of similar material, see the pages on X-bar theory.