Phrase
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In grammar, a phrase is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence.
For example the house at the end of the street (example 1) is a phrase. It acts like a noun. It contains the phrase at the end of the street (example 2), a prepositional phrase which acts like an adjective. Example 2 could be replaced by white, to make the phrase the white house. Examples 1 and 2 contain the phrase the end of the street (example 3) which acts like a noun. It could be replaced by the cross-roads to give the house at the cross-roads.
Most phrases have a or central word which defines the type of phrase. This word is called the head of the phrase. Some phrases, however, can be headless. For example, the rich is a noun phrase composed of a determiner and an adjective, but no noun.
Phrases may be classified by the type of head they take
- Prepositional phrase (PP) with a preposition as head (e.g. in love, over the rainbow). Languages that use postpositions instead have postpositional phrases. The two types are sometimes commonly referred to as adpositional phrases.
- Noun phrase (NP) with a noun as head (e.g. the black cat, a cat on the mat)
- Verb phrase (VP) with a verb as head (e.g. eat cheese, jump up and down)
- Adjectival phrase (AP) with an adjective as head (e.g. full of toys)
- Adverbial phrase (AdvP) with an adverb as head (e.g. very carefully)
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[edit] Formal definition
A phrase is a syntactic structure which has syntactic properties derived from its head.
[edit] Complexity
A complex phrase consists of several words, whereas a simple phrase consists of only one word. This terminology is especially often used with verb phrases:
- simple past and present are simple phrases, which require just one verb
- complex verb have one or two aspects added, hence require additional two or three words
"Complex", which is phrase-level, is often confused with "compound", which is word-level. However, there are certain phenomena that formally seem to be phrases but semantically are more like compounds, like "women's magazines", which has the form of a possessive noun phrase, but which refers (just like a compound) to one specific lexeme (i.e. a magazine for women and not some magazine owned by a woman).
[edit] Semiotic approaches to the concept of "phrase"
In more semiotic approaches to language, such as the more cognitivist versions of construction grammar, a phrasal structure is not only a certain formal combination of word types whose features are inherited from the head. Here each phrasal structure also expresses some type of conceptual content, be it specific or abstract.
