phrase
Sign in to saveIn grammar, a phrase called an expression in some contexts is a group of one or more words acting as a grammatical unit. This means that a phrase can be treated as a unit within a larger structure. For instance, the English sentence "the squirrel is very happy" is a clause phrase which contains the noun phrase "the squirrel" and the verb phrase "is very happy". Additionally, "very happy" is an adjective phrase. 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 dif
AI overview
A phrase is a group of words that functions together as a single grammatical unit, like "the squirrel" or "is very happy" in a sentence. Understanding phrases matters because they help explain how language is organized and structured—breaking sentences into smaller building blocks that linguists and grammarians can analyze.
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Article
7 sectionsContents
- Phrase trees
- Heads and dependents
- Functional categories
- Variation among theories of syntax
- See also
- Notes
- References
In grammar, a phrase called an expression in some contexts is a group of one or more words acting as a grammatical unit. This means that a phrase can be treated as a unit within a larger structure. For instance, the English sentence "the squirrel is very happy" is a clause phrase which contains the noun phrase "the squirrel" and the verb phrase "is very happy". Additionally, "very happy" is an adjective phrase. 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", or "kick the bucket". 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.