Structurally word-groups can be considered in different ways. Word-groups may be described as for the order and arrangement of the component-members. E.g., the word-group to read a book can be classified as a verbal-nominal group, to look at smb.- as a verbal-prepositional-nominal group, etc.
By the criterion of distribution all word-groups may be divided into two big classes: according to their head-words and according to their syntactical patterns.
Word-groups may be classified according to their head-words into:
nominal groups - red flower;
adjective groups - kind to people;
verbal groups - to speak well.
The head is not necessarily the component that occurs first.
Word-groups are classified according to their syntactical pattern into predicative and non-predicative groups. Such word-groups as he went, Bob walks that have a syntactic structure similar to that of a sentence are termed as predicative, all others are non-predicative ones.
Non-predicative word-groups are divided into subordinative and coordi-native depending on the type of syntactic relations between the components. E.g., a red flower, a man of freedom are subordinative non-predicative word-groups, red and freedom being dependent words, while day and night, do and die are coordinative non-predicative word-groups.