Noun Phrase

A noun phrase or nominal phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase which has a noun (or indefinite pronoun) as its head word, or which performs the same grammatical function as such a phrase. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.

Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as the complements of prepositions or postpositions. Noun phrases can be embedded inside each other; for instance, the noun phrase some of his constituents contains the shorter noun phrase his constituents.

In some modern theories of grammar, noun phrases with determiners are analyzed as having the determiner rather than the noun as their head; they are then referred to as determiner phrases.

Components of noun phrases

A typical noun phrase consists of a noun (the head of the phrase) together with zero or more modifiers of various types. The chief types of these modifiers are:

·         determiners, such as the, this, my, some

·         attributive adjectives, such as large, beautiful, sweeter

·         adjective phrases and participial phrases, such as extremely large, hard as nails, made of wood, sitting on the step

·         noun adjuncts, such as college in the noun phrase a college student

·         prepositional phrases, such as in the drawing room, of his aunt

·         relative clauses, such as which we noticed

·         other clauses serving as complements to the noun, such as that God exists in the noun phrase the belief that God exists

·         infinitive phrases, such as to sing well and to beat in the noun phrases a desire to sing well and the man to beat

The allowability, form and position of these elements depend on the syntax of the language in question. In English, determiners, adjectives (and some adjective phrases) and noun modifiers precede the head noun, whereas the heavier units – phrases and clauses – generally follow it. This is part of a strong tendency in English to place heavier constituents to the right, making English more of a head-initial language. Head-final languages (e.g. Japanese and Turkish) are more likely to place all modifiers before the head noun. Other languages, such as French, often place even single-word adjectives after the noun.

Noun phrases can take different forms than that described above, for example when the head is a pronoun rather than a noun, or when elements are linked with a coordinating conjunction such asand, or, but. For more information about the structure of noun phrases in English, see English grammar: Noun phrases.

Often a noun phrase is just a noun or a pronoun:

People like to have money.
I am tired.
It is getting late.

or a determiner and a noun …:

Our friends have bought a house in the village.
Those houses are very expensive.

… perhaps with an adjective:

Our closest friends have just bought a new house in the village.

Sometimes the noun phrase begins with a quantifier:

All those children go to school here.
Both of my younger brothers are married
Some people spend a lot of money.

Numbers :

Quantifiers come before determiners, but numbers come after determiners:

My four children go to school here. (All my children go to school here.)
Those two suitcases are mine. (Both those suitcases are mine)

So the noun phrase is built up in this way:

Noun: people; money
Determiner + noun: the village, a house, our friends; those houses
Quantifier + noun: some people; a lot of money
Determiner + adjective + noun: our closest friends; a new house.
Quantifier + determiner + noun: all those children;
Quantifier + determiner + adjective + noun: both of my younger brothers

The noun phrase can be quite complicated:

a loaf of nice fresh brown bread
the eight-year-old boy who attempted to rob a sweet shop with a pistol
that attractive young woman in the blue dress sitting over there in the corner

Match noun phrases to patterns

Some words and phrases come after the noun. These are called postmodifiers. A noun phrase can be postmodified in several ways. Here are some examples:

• with a prepositional phrase:

a man with a gun
the boy in the blue shirt
the house on the corner

• with an –ing phrase:

the man standing over there
the boy talking to Angela

• with a relative clause:

the man we met yesterday
the house that Jack built
the woman who discovered radium
an eight-year-old boy who attempted to rob a sweet shop

• with a that clause.
This is very common with reporting or summarising nouns like idea, fact, belief, suggestion:

He’s still very fit, in spite of the fact that he’s over eighty.
She got the idea that people didn’t like her.
There was a suggestion that the children should be sent home.

• with a to-infinitive.
This is very common after indefinite pronouns and adverbs:

You should take something to read.
I need somewhere to sleep.
I’ve got no decent shoes to wear.

 
There may be more than one postmodifier:

an eight-year old boy with a gun who tried to rob a sweet shop
that girl over there in a green dress drinking a coke

Source : http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/clause-phrase-and-sentence/noun-phrase

Biography Of Douglas Engelbart

Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart in 2008
Born	January 30, 1925 (age 88) Portland, Oregon, USA
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	United States
Fields	Inventor
Institutions	SRI International, Tymshare, McDonnell Douglas, Bootstrap Institute/Alliance,[1] The Doug Engelbart Institute
Alma mater	Oregon State College (BS) UC Berkeley (PhD)
Doctoral advisor	John R. Woodyard
Known for	Computer mouse, Hypertext,Groupware, Interactive computing
Influences	Vannevar Bush
Notable awards	National Medal of Technology, Lemelson-MIT Prize, Turing Award, Lovelace Medal, Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, Computer History Museum Fellow Award[2]

Douglas "Doug" Carl Engelbart (born January 30, 1925) is an American inventor, and an early computer and internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on the challenges of human–computer interaction, particularly while at his Augmentation Research Center Lab in SRI International, resulting in the invention of the computer mouse,^[3] and the development of hypertext, networked computers, and precursors to graphical user interfaces.

He is a committed, vocal proponent of the development and use of computers and networks to help cope with the world’s increasingly urgent and complex problems.^[4] Engelbart embedded a set of organizing principles in his lab, which he termed "bootstrapping strategy". He designed the strategy to accelerate the rate of innovation of his lab.^[5]

Early life and education

Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon on January 30, 1925, to Carl Louis Engelbart and Gladys Charlotte Amelia Munson Engelbart. He is ofGerman, Swedish and Norwegian descent.^[6]

He was the middle of three children, with a sister Dorianne (3 years older), and a brother David (14 months younger). They lived in Portland in his early years, and moved to the countryside to Johnson Creek when he was 9 or 10, after the death of his father. He graduated from Portland's Franklin High School in 1942.^[7]

Midway through his college studies at Oregon State University (then called Oregon State College), near the end of World War II, he was drafted into the US Navy, serving two years as a radar technician in the Philippines. On a small island, in a tiny hut on stilts, he first read Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think", which greatly inspired him.^[7] He returned to Oregon State and completed his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1948. While at Oregon State, he was a member of Sigma Phi Epsilon social fraternity.^[8]

He was hired by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics at the Ames Research Center, where he worked through 1951.^[9]

Career and accomplishments[edit]

Engelbart's career was inspired in 1951 when he was engaged to be married and realized he had no career goals beyond getting a good education and a decent job.[citation needed] Over several months he reasoned that:Epiphany

1. he would focus his career on making the world a better place;
2. any serious effort to make the world better requires some kind of organized effort;
3. harnessing the collective human intellect of all the people contributing to effective solutions was the key;
4. if you could dramatically improve how we do that, you'd be boosting every effort on the planet to solve important problems—the sooner the better; and
5. computers could be the vehicle for dramatically improving this capability.^{[citation needed]}

In 1945, Engelbart had read with interest Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think",^[11] a call to action for making knowledge widely available as a national peacetime grand challenge. He had also read something about computers (a relatively recent phenomenon), and from his experience as a radar technician he knew that information could be analyzed and displayed on a screen. He envisioned intellectual workers sitting at display "working stations", flying through information space, harnessing their collective intellectual capacity to solve important problems together in much more powerful ways. Harnessing collective intellect, facilitated by interactive computers, became his life's mission at a time when computers were viewed as number crunching tools.

He enrolled in graduate school in electrical engineering at University of California, Berkeley, graduating with an Master of Science degree in 1953, and a Ph.D. in 1955.^[9] As a graduate student at Berkeley he assisted in the construction of the California Digital Computer project CALDIC. His graduate work led to several patents.^[12] After completing his PhD, Engelbart stayed on at Berkeley as an assistant professor to teach for a year, and left when it was clear he could not pursue his vision there. Engelbart then formed a startup, Digital Techniques, to commercialize some of his doctorate research on storage devices, but after a year decided instead to pursue the research he had been dreaming of since 1951.

SRI and ARC[edit]

Engelbart took a position at SRI International (SRI, known then as the Stanford Research Institute) in Menlo Park, California in 1957. He initially worked for Hewitt Crane on magnetic devices and miniaturization of electronics; Engelbart and Crane became lifelong friends.^{[citation needed]} At SRI, Engelbart gradually obtained over a dozen patents (some resulting from his graduate work), and by 1962 produced a report about his vision and proposed research agenda titled Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.^[13]

This led to funding from ARPA to launch his work. Engelbart recruited a research team in his new Augmentation Research Center (ARC, the lab he founded at SRI), and became the driving force behind the design and development of the oN-Line System (NLS). He and his team developed computer interface elements such as bitmapped screens, the mouse, hypertext, collaborative tools, and precursors to the graphical user interface. He conceived and developed many of his user interface ideas back in the mid-1960s, long before the personal computer revolution, at a time when most individuals were kept away from computers, and could only use computers through intermediaries (see batch processing), and when software tended to be written for vertical applications in proprietary systems.

Two Apple Macintosh Plus mice, 1986

Engelbart applied for a patent in 1967 and received it in 1970, for the wooden shell with two metal wheels (computer mouse – U.S. Patent 3,541,541), which he had developed with Bill English, his lead engineer, a few years earlier. In the patent application it is described as an "X-Y position indicator for a display system". Engelbart later revealed that it was nicknamed the "mouse" because the tail came out the end. His group also called the on-screen cursor a "bug", but this term was not widely adopted.^[14]

He never received any royalties for his mouse invention. During an interview, he says "SRI patented the mouse, but they really had no idea of its value. Some years later it was learned that they had licensed it to Apple for something like $40,000."^[15] Engelbart showcased the chorded keyboard and many more of his and ARC's inventions in 1968 at the so-called Mother of All Demos.^[16]

ARPANET

Engelbart's research was funded by DARPA, and SRI's ARC became involved with the ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet. The first message on the ARPANET was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, at 10:30 p.m, on October 29, 1969 from Boelter Hall 3420.Supervised byLeonard Kleinrock, Kline transmitted from the university's SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the Stanford Research Institute's SDS 940 Host computer. The message text was the word "login"; the "l" and the "o" letters were transmitted, but the system then crashed. Hence, the literal first message over the ARPANET was "lo". About an hour later, having recovered from the crash, the SDS Sigma 7 computer effected a full "login".

The first permanent ARPANET link was established on November 21, 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. By December 5, 1969, the entire four-node network was established.^[18] In addition to SRI and UCLA, UCSB, and the University of Utah were part of the original four network nodes.

ARC soon became the first Network Information Center and thus managed the directory for connections among all ARPANET nodes. ARC also published a large percentage of the early Request For Comments, an ongoing series of publications that document the evolution of ARPANET into the Internet. Although the NIC at first used NLS, it was intended to be a production service to other network users, while Engelbart continued to focus on innovative research. This inherent conflict led to establishing the NIC as its own group, led by Elizabeth J. Feinler.^[19]

Anecdotal notes

Historian of science Thierry Bardini argues that Engelbart's complex personal philosophy (which drove all his research) foreshadowed the modern application of the concept of coevolution to the philosophy and use of technology. Bardini points out that Engelbart was strongly influenced by the principle of linguistic relativity developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf. Where Whorf reasoned that the sophistication of a language controls the sophistication of the thoughts that can be expressed by a speaker of that language, Engelbart reasoned that the state of our current technology controls our ability to manipulate information, and that fact in turn will control our ability to develop new, improved technologies. He thus set himself to the revolutionary task of developing computer-based technologies for manipulating information directly, and also to improve individual and group processes for knowledge-work.