THE ENGLISH NOUN PHRASE

The English Noun Phrase is a collection of materials used over the years in teaching English grammar to Italian university students at a pre-intermediate and intermediate level. Rather than being a complete grammar of the noun phrase, it is a series of important topics, the sort of difficulties that Italian students usually find. So for example there are chapters on word order in the noun phrase (especially pre-modifying elements), subject-verb agreement, the issue of gender, the mass/count distinction in nouns, the use of the definite article, the various uses of the ’s-genitive construction (specifying and descriptive, the so-called double genitive), relative clauses and the principle of restrictive and non-restrictive, the replacive pronouns in substitution of the head of the noun phrase, and in general the whole problem of the noun+noun sequence and lexical density (with all the stylistic considerations involved). Each grammar topic is accompanied by well-tried explanations, examples, reading passages and exercises where needed (to most of which there is a key provided at the back of the book). While there are few overt references to Italian, the approach is contrastive, reflecting the origins of the material, and the emphasis is always on the difficulties experienced by the Italian learner