Abstract
Latin is a language without articles. In languages such as English and French, which have articles, the term phrase is used for combinations of articles and nouns, bare nouns representing special cases. This chapter begins the study of Latin noun phrases with a survey of the semantic and syntactic properties of elements that build up a noun phrase: nouns and their modifiers. It discusses the parameters useful for their description, based on Lyons' typology which has been recently worked out in Functional Discourse Grammar, especially by Hengeveld and Rijkhoff. The proposed criteria are then applied to Latin, with one very important additional criterion, that of valency. The types of modifiers are presented. The chapter aims to be a systematic examination of nouns and modifiers through which we can identify their characteristic properties; this point is useful for understanding the combinations of elements in a noun phrase.Keywords: English; Hengeveld; Latin; modifiers; noun; Rijkhoff; semantic properties; syntactic properties
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