Consists of a noun as a major element, alone or accompanied by one or more modifiers. A noun functioning as a major element may be a common noun, proper noun or pronoun. Expressions belonging to a range of classes may function as modifiers:

Those that precede the main noun include:

• determiners (for example, ‘the car’, ‘a disaster’, ‘some people’, ‘many mistakes’)

• possessive noun groups/phrases and pronouns (for example, ‘the old man's house’, ‘Kim's behaviour’, ‘my father’)

• numerals (for example, ‘two days’, ‘thirty casualties’, ‘a hundred students’)

• adjectives (for example, ‘grave danger’, ‘a nice day’, ‘some new ideas’, ‘poor Tom’)

• nouns (for example, ‘the unemployment rate’, ‘a tax problem’, ‘a Qantas pilot’)

Those that follow the main noun usually belong to one or other of the following classes:

• prepositional phrases (for example, ‘a pot of tea’, ‘the way to Adelaide’, ‘work in progress’)

• subordinate clauses (for example, ‘the woman who wrote it’, ‘people living near the coast’).