NOUN PHRASES AND THEIR SYNTACTIC FUNCTIONS IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN LANGUAGE

A phrase is a word or a group of words that may stand as a single grammatical unit. It can be part of a clause or a sentence with or without any specific meaning. Phrases are mandatory constituents of simple, complex and compound sentences. The syntax of Albanian language has an early beginning, but its development is still an ongoing process. The main issues faced by the syntax of Albanian language have been the terminology, definition and classification of grammar and syntactic units. In the syntax of Albanian language there is a constant process of codification, i.e., definition of units and syntactic categories. Our interest here is the definition of the terms word-group, syntagm, phrase and syntactic constituent. On the other hand, the term phrase is well defined in English language. Clear and timely classification of different types of phrases has facilitated syntactic analysis of clauses and sentences. Phrases and the types of phrases are different in English and Albanian language. Apart from the type, the number of phrases is also different. The noun phrase is the most important phrase in both English and Albanian language because of its syntactic functions. While other phrases have more limited syntactic functions, noun phrases may function as a subject, object (direct or indirect object), subject complement, object complement, modifier or apposition.Keywords: Phrases, noun phrases, syntactic functions, English, Albanian