What is a noun phrase

A noun phrase, or nominal, is a phrase that has a noun as its head or performs the same grammatical function as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type

Example:

Examples of noun phrase as direct object: I want a skate board. Should we buy the yellow house? Examples of noun phrase as object of preposition: Jeff rode on a skate board. Karen lives in the yellow house.

lemme see i dont think i know that one h

the sentence does not violate the phrase structure second rule (introduced by noam chomsky) because noun phrases consist of a determiner such as a, the or every, and a noun. in the sentence, the noun phrase the cake includes a determiner (the) and a noun (cake).

on the other hand, the first rule indicates that a sentence encloses a noun phrase, followed by a verb phrase. the example sentence can be analysed as follows:

john (n) + ate (v) + the (det) + cake (n).