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Syntax » Focus & Content » Traditional Grammar » General Grammatical Functions: Head, Complement, Modifier and Specifier

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.

< The Modifier | General Linguistics | The Head >


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