The purpose of this study is to examine the noun phrase, nominal clause, adnominal clause. In Korean grammar, ‘phrase’ aims to be used in the narrow sense which is different from ‘clause’ in the viewpoint of the subject-predicate relation. But in the real Korean grammatical description, there has been confused aspect where the broad ‘phrase’ and narrow ‘phrase’ co-exists. This confusion is relevant to the division of noun phrase into nominal clause and adnominal clause in the period of the present Korean grammar establishment. While the subject phrase and subject clause of the past school grammar textbooks were defined on the basis of sentence constituents, the noun phrase is defined on the basis of distribution and the nominal clause is defined on the basis of function(sentence constituents) in the present Korean grammar. The distributional characteristics of ‘noun phrase’ must be examined in detail and then the functional characteristics of ‘noun phrase’ which shares the identity of function with word, clause must be showed secondarily. In particular, noun phrase and nominal clause must be differentiated but the broad noun phrase which includes adnominal clause is valuable in the present Korean grammar.