Syntactic function NP
composite nominal complex nominal expression.
Our concept of NP differs, for systematic theoretical reasons, from that current in general linguistics because the concept of a word as distinct from an idiomatic syntactic collocation is not well-defined for classical Chinese. The question of the wordhood of a given NP does not arise until a testable criterion or definition of the notion of the word for classical Chinese is forthcoming. It is not clear that the notion of a word, as it is currently employed for many languages, usefully applies to an ancient language like classical Chinese where intonational features of wordhood cannot normally be tested. There are binomes like 葡萄 and 蝴蝶 which are bisyllabic but not semantically compound because their parts have no independent meaning. These belong to the category nn "semantically unanalysable binome", in analogy with the much commoner category series of vv "unanalysable verbal binomes". And any definition of the notion of a word for classical Chinese would have to classify these as words rather than as syntactic compounds, one would have thought. Reduplicated "NPs" are listed under n.red
Usage
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