Phrase
A phrase is a key grammatical or syntactic unit. In terms of its meaning, a phrase is an individual element of a sentence or clause. It will be made up of one or more words and occupy a particular ‘syntactic slot’ within its clause or sentence, e.g. it will act as subject, predicate or object. A useful rough and ready ‘test’ for a phrase is that it can be ‘replaced’ in its clause or sentence by a single word that is roughly its equivalent. Thus in the sentence, ‘That old guy over there has been patiently waiting for three and a half hours already’, the noun phrase, ‘The tall man over there’ could be replaced by ‘he’; the verb phrase ‘has been patiently waiting’ could be replaced by ‘waited’, the prepositional phrase ‘for three and a half hours’ could be replaced by ‘ages’!
- A phrase acts as a unit with individual meaning, but without sufficiently completeness to be a clause or sentence by itself.
Phrases – with words – are the basic building blocks of clauses and sentences. A phrase can always be split into two parts: its head word which is linked to some kind of modification of the head word. The head word is the central part of the phrase and the remaining words act to modify this head word in some way, e.g. ‘The peculiarly strong creature’ – can you see that the head word of this noun phrase is the noun, ‘creature’?
As suggested above, a phrase does, in fact, act just like an individual word. The next example sentence contains three phrases and a single main clause. Can you recognise which are the phrases and which is the clause?
In a frenzy, without thinking, he grabbed him by the neck.
You might like to think that, between each word of the three phrases above, there exists a kind of ‘word glue’ that gives the phrase its coherent quality. The phrases ‘In a frenzy’, ‘without thinking’ and ‘by the neck’ all can be seen to exist as individual units of meaning, i.e. as individual phrases.
- Notice that the clause in the above sentence cannot be called a phrase because it is built around a verb (i.e. a verb phrase), ‘he grabbed him.’
