Main Page - light-heavy (AWE)

Which elements are the units ordered in sentences?

To understand the difference between "heavy" and "light" sentence elements, let's first introduce the concept of a "noun phrase".

Noun Phrases (NPs)

nouns (substantiivit) and noun phrases (substantiivilausekkeet) are the primary units or "building blocks" of the sentence. As you'll note in the example below, not only do nouns phrases comprise the majority of the elements in the sentence but they also fulfill many of the most important fuctions, including the subject, complement, and object of the sentence.

The greenhouse effect	is	the rise in temperature that the Earth experiences
subject	verb	complement

because	certain gases in the atmosphere	trap	energy from the sun.
	subject	verb	object

If we think of noun phrases (NPs) are the main building material for the sentence, then verbs, prepositions and subordinators act as the "glue" that holds our sentence together. Let's now move on to take a closer look at what is a noun.