Write out or type the following passage (it’s the opening paragraph of the preface to Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct) with the nouns underlined and the NPs enclosed in square brackets. (Don’t forget that one NP can occur within another: in a phrase like I met the father of the bride, for example, the bride is an NP within the larger NP the father of the bride, so you would write [the father of [the bride]])



I have never met a person who is not interested in language. I wrote this book to try to satisfy that curiosity. Language is beginning to submit to that uniquely satisfying kind of understanding that we call science, but the news has been kept a secret.