Noun phrase

A noun phrase is a phrase (one or more words that can be meaningfully grouped together) that has a noun as its head  (the most important and meaningful word in the phrase).

Characteristics

 * A noun phrase must contain at least one noun.
 * A noun phrase may also contain some grammatical words or affixes usually associated with noun phrases. The following grammatical categories are associated with nouns:
 * CASE (shown by the order of the noun phrases in a sentence)
 * NUMBER (often shown by the Inflectional affix -s which sometimes indicates plural)
 * GENDER (only really used for personal pronouns like 'he', 'him', 'her')

Examples

 * John is fat.
 * 'John' is a very simple noun phrase. It contains only the word 'John'.
 * The CASE, NUMBER and GENDER information are all obvious from the sentence, and so not necessary.
 * 'The bear' is a noun phrase because it has a noun ('bear') as the most meaningful word in the phrase.