The simple sentence

This chapter deals with simple declarative sentences and their main properties. In section 1, some of the most salient properties of simple sentences in Catalan, as a Romance language, are schematically described. Section 2 offers an approach to sentence constituents and their syntactic functions. Section 3 is devoted to the head of the NP, the noun and its classes, and to the specifiers of the NP: articles, demonstratives, possessives, and quantifiers (numerals, quantitatives, indefinites and universals). Special attention is paid to partitive constructions in 3.2.4. In section 4, the syntactic functions of personal strong and weak pronouns are described. Other weak pronouns - en, hi and ho - are studied in 4.2. The types of adjectives and the constituents of the AdjP are described in section 5, while the behavior of stressed and unstressed prepositions and that of adverbs are presented in sections 6 and 7, respectively. Section 8 examines the properties of verbs and verb phrases and addresses the VP’s constituents and types of verbs (transitive verbs in 8.1, intransitive in 8.2, unaccusative verbs and constructions in 8.3 and copular, quasi-copular and presentational verbs in 8.4). Section 9 is devoted to verbal tenses (the indicative and subjunctive tenses), while section 10 deals with the aspectual and modal verbal periphrases. Finally, affirmative polarity and negative polarity in declarative sentences are described in section 11.