A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German
https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/
Page 138 of 151
12/8/2017
In German, unlike English, dates don’t always need to be introduced by a
preposition:
Ich komme Montag.
I’m coming on Monday.
Sie ist 1985 geboren.
She was born in 1985.
Unit: Reference
8. Syntax Terminology
Regarding elementary syntax terms please see “Two Things You Will Need to
Succeed.” The following higher-level syntax concepts will help you recognize largerscale
units of meaning when reading a German sentence.
Noun Phrase
The group of words that modify a noun. The value to you of recognizing noun
phrases is the certainty you gain that words outside of the noun phrase cannot be
modifiers of this noun, and vice versa, everything inside applies to this noun, not to
some other part of the sentence. The leftmost word in a noun phrase is often an
article (definite or indefinite). This concept is introduced in this textbook in the Unit
4 section on adjective endings. The underlined words are the noun phrases in the
following examples:
Der starke Junge ißt einen Apfel.
Viele Bäume gehören zu diesem wohl überstrapazierten Förster.
In all cases the rightmost word will be the noun itself, although genitive noun chains
are in fact rightward extensions of the noun phrase, simply adding another subnoun
phrase. Example:
Gesunde Kinder des vorigen Jahrhunderts aßen mindestens wochentlich zwei
Äpfel.
You can alternatively read genitive noun chains as independent noun phrases, to
help you keep straight the relationships between the parts of the larger genitive
noun chain: