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{{Short description|Group of (one or more) words}}{{Unreferenced section|date=May 2023}}In grammar, a phrase{{mdash}}called expression in some contexts{{mdash}}is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consist of a single word or a complete sentence. In theoretical linguistics, phrases are often analyzed as units of syntactic structure such as a constituent. There is a difference between the common use of the term phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, a phrase is usually a group of words with some special idiomatic meaning or other significance, such as "all rights reserved", "economical with the truth", "kick the bucket", and the like. It may be a euphemism, a saying or proverb, a fixed expression, a figure of speech, etc.. In linguistics, these are known as phrasemes.In theories of syntax, a phrase is any group of words, or sometimes a single word, which plays a particular role within the syntactic structure of a sentence. It does not have to have any special meaning or significance, or even exist anywhere outside of the sentence being analyzed, but it must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the sentence Yesterday I saw an orange bird with a white neck, the words an orange bird with a white neck form a noun phrase, or a determiner phrase in some theories, which functions as the object of the sentence.- the content below is remote from Wikipedia
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Phrase trees
Many theories of syntax and grammar illustrate sentence structure using phrase 'trees', which provide schematics of how the words in a sentence are grouped and relate to each other. A tree shows the words, phrases, and clauses that make up a sentence. Any word combination that corresponds to a complete subtree can be seen as a phrase.There are two competing principles for constructing trees; they produce 'constituency' and 'dependency' trees and both are illustrated here using an example sentence. The constituency-based tree is on the left and the dependency-based tree is on the right:
(File:The house at the end of the street.jpg|Trees illustrating phrases)
Heads and dependents
In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain a head, which identifies the type and linguistic features of the phrase. The syntactic category of the head is used to name the category of the phrase;Kroeger 2005:37 for example, a phrase whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase. The remaining words in a phrase are called the dependents of the head.In the following phrases the head-word, or head, is bolded:
too slowly â Adverb phrase (AdvP); the head is an adverb
very happy â Adjective phrase (AP); the head is an adjective
the massive dinosaur â Noun phrase (NP); the head is a noun (but see below for the determiner phrase analysis)
at lunch â Preposition phrase (PP); the head is a preposition
watch TV â Verb phrase (VP); the head is a verb
before that happened â Subordinator phrase (SP); the head is a subordinating conjunctionâit subordinates the independent clause
Functional categories
Some modern theories of syntax introduce functional categories in which the head of a phrase is a functional lexical item. Some functional heads in some languages are not pronounced, but are rather covert. For example, in order to explain certain syntactic patterns which correlate with the speech act a sentence performs, some researchers have posited force phrases (ForceP), whose heads are not pronounced in many languages including English. Similarly, many frameworks assume that covert determiners are present in bare noun phrases such as proper names.Another type is the inflectional phrase, where (for example) a finite verb phrase is taken to be the complement of a functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to inflect â for agreement with its subject (which is the specifier of INFL), for tense and aspect, etc. If these factors are treated separately, then more specific categories may be considered: tense phrase (TP), where the verb phrase is the complement of an abstract "tense" element; aspect phrase; agreement phrase and so on.Further examples of such proposed categories include topic phrase and focus phrase, which are argued to be headed by elements that encode the need for a constituent of the sentence to be marked as the topic or focus.Variation among theories of syntax
Theories of syntax differ in what they regard as a phrase. For instance, while most if not all theories of syntax acknowledge the existence of verb phrases (VPs), Phrase structure grammars acknowledge both finite verb phrases and non-finite verb phrases while dependency grammars only acknowledge non-finite verb phrases. The split between these views persists due to conflicting results from the standard empirical diagnostics of phrasehood such as constituency tests.For empirical arguments against finite VP's, see Miller (2011:54f.) and Osborne (2011:323f.).The distinction is illustrated with the following examples:
The Republicans may nominate Newt. - Finite VP in bold
The Republicans may nominate Newt. - Non-finite VP in bold
(File:Phrase 2.jpg|Phrase picture 2)
See also
{{div col|colwidth=22em}}- Clause
- Constituent (linguistics)
- Dependency grammar
- Finite verb
- Head (linguistics)
- Non-finite verb
- Phrase structure grammar
- Sentence (linguistics)
- Syntactic category
- Verb phrase
- Phraseme
- X-bar theory
Notes
{{Reflist}}References
{{div col|colwidth=30em}}- Finch, G. 2000. Linguistic terms and concepts. New York: St. Martin's Press.
- Kroeger, Paul 2005. Analyzing grammar: An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
- Miller, J. 2011. A critical introduction to syntax. London: continuum.
- Osborne, Timothy, Michael Putnam, and Thomas Gross 2011. Bare phrase structure, label-less structures, and specifier-less syntax: Is Minimalism becoming a dependency grammar? The Linguistic Review 28: 315â364.
- Sobin, N. 2011. Syntactic analysis: The basics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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