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Is féidir focail aonair chomh maith le codanna casta struchtúrtha uile na habairte a thuairisciú mar fhoirm , is é sin a bhfuil iontu, agus feidhm {/ b}, a ról san abairt. San abairt Sheol gníomhaireacht spáis na hEorpa taiscéalaí spáis go Mars in 2003, mar shampla, tá cúig chomhábhair, rud a léiríonn cé a rinne {/ b} (sheol) cén rud {/ b}, chomh maith le cén áit {/ b} agus cathain {/ b}.
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Individual words as well as more complex structural parts of a sentence can all be described in terms of form, that is what they are or consist of, and function, what their role in the sentence is. In the sentence The European space agency launched a space probe to Mars in 2003, for instance, there are five constituents, indicating who did (launched) what, as well as where and when. The core constituent is the verb launched, which directly controls the who and what arguments (called subject and object in syntactic theory), and more loosely the time and place satellites (called adverbials). Such functional constituents can be thought of as slots to be filled with material of varying syntactic form. Thus, the subject the European space agency is a is not only a great alternative to NASA, but also a group of words, called a noun phrase (np) because it is headed by a noun, and because it can be replaced with a simple (proper) noun, ESA, or nominal pronoun, it. While all languages can express who-did-what-when-where, they do so in wildly divergent ways in terms of constituent order (Typology).
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