The grammar npcomponent.grm recognizes "high-level" components of  English noun phrases.  Specifically, it defines SPECIFIERs and pre-determiners (PRE-DET) and sequences of those types.  SPECIFIERs can include quantity phrases (QUANTITY-P) like "almost fifty", phrases of ordinal and direction (ORDIR-P) like "second [from/to] last", and qualifier phrases (QUALIFIER-P) like "only", "remaining", "very similar", and "rather different".  The loop from node (SPECIFIER 1) to itself permits any number of specifiers in any sequence.  However, settings and tests in semantic action computations that will be attached to nodes (SPECIFIER 1) and (SPECIFIER 2) later on will be used to detect and reject incompatible or redundant uses of SPECIFIERs, such as multiple quantity phrases, multiple phrases of ordinal and direction, or sequences of ADJ-DESCR-P (descriptive adjective) phrases, which will already have been recognized as containing multiple adjectives.  Pre-determiners (PRE-DET) at the beginning of a noun phrase can include approximaters (APPROX), as in "very nearly my worst year" or "just about the only chance", and/or quantity comparisons (QUANT-P-COMPARISON), as in "more than my salary" or "a whole lot less than the price of a car".  Post-descriptors (POSTDESCRIP-P) are defined in the module postdescrip.grm and can include prepositional prhases as well as phrases like "here", "just now", and "right over there".

The grammar accepts descriptive-adjective phrases followed by one or more nouns as ADJNOUN phrases.  Examples are "big green frogs", "small white dog house", "black and white cat", and "big, tasty ice cream cone".  Semantically, these refer either (when plural) to members of a general category, or (when singular) to a single, unspecified member of a general category.  They generally do not designate particular instances of things in the context of the phrase until they have been modified by a designator phrase (DESIGNATOR-P).  (An exception is when they are used vocatively, to address an entity or entities in the context, as in the examples "Big green frogs, jump!" or "Big, tasty ice cream cone, I'm going to eat you."  Other exceptions are when such phrases are used in official forms, as in "Please submit: (a) birth certificate; (b) passport" [Quirk 5.42] or in headlines "Film Star Marries Ex-Priest" [Quirk 11.46])   A loop between the nodes (ADJNOUN 1) and (COMMA-COORD 3)  allows for conjunction lists of ADJNOUNs.  That allows for ADJNOUN-P phrases like "big black dog and small gray cat".   However, the final node ($$ 2) will require a semantic action test to prevent such phrases when all of the ADJNOUNs in the conjunction consist only of NOUN-Ps.  For in that case the conjunctive phrase would be redundant with the conjunctive phrase NOUN-P itself, as defined in the grammar noun-p.grm.  For example, without that semantic action test, the phrase "dog and cat" would be accepted either as a conjunction of two NOUN2s into a single NOUN-P, which would then be acccepted as a single ADJNOUN and then as an ADJNOUN-P, or as a conjunction of two ADJNOUN phrases into an ADJNOUN-P.  Such a syntactic ambiguity would not be semantically significant.

The grammar also recognizes designator phrases, which consist of sequences of optional pre-determiners, determiners, and specifiers.  Examples are "the very last two", "another five such", "my remaining", and "their".  These, optionally followed by ADJNOUN phrases, make up basic noun phrases (NOUNPHRASE0).  However, some designator phrases (e.g., "a", "the", "their", or "every") are incomplete as noun phrases and require ADJNOUN phrases to complete them.  The detection of such designator phrases will be handled later by a semantic action and test:  Some designator phrases (e.g. "the first", "another three", "every last") will set a semantic feature to indicate that a default semantic type has been set, in case there is no following ADJNOUN phrase.  However, other designator phrases (e.g. "a", "the", "both their", "my every") will set the same semantic feature to indicate that a default semantic type has not been set.  That semantic feature can then be tested at the node ($$ 5) to determine whether an advance into that node will be permitted.  Similarly, semantic action and test computations will be needed to permit some transitions from node (POSTDESCRIP-P 1) to node (DESIGNATOR-P 2) (e.g. "very tall a horse", "too late an arrival", "of my children the first two") while not permitting others.

Finally, the npcomponent.grm grammar recognizes several lists of designators, separated by commas and/or coordinating conjunctions, as designator phrases.  This allows the grammar to recognize phrases like "a few examples of my and many examples of your paintings", "the first two and the last three people", "the first two or last three people", "among all the animals, your two and my only dogs", "the first two but not the last three people".  These are sometimes considered to be examples of ellipsis: the omission of repeated words or phrases for brevity.  In these examples, the omitted words are the nouns ("paintings", "people", etc.).  Thus, "the first two and the last three people" can be considered to be an elliptical form of "the first two people and the last three people".  In the npcomponent.grm grammar, one designator phrase type, DESIG1, is accepted as a designator only when it occurs as part of a conjunctive phrase, in an example like "the color of my and the flavor of your wine", which is parsed as ((((the color) of my) and ((the flavor) of your)) wine).  That restriction prevents the phrase "the color of my wine" being parsed with "the color of my" as a designator phrase (DESIGNATOR-P).