ENGA01

Grammar & Translation

What is a phrase?
One of the things that students often find difficult in this course is the concept of the
grammatical ‘phrase’. The main reason is probably that the term ‘phrase’ is not extensively
used in language education below university level, and when it is used, it has a much more
general and non-technical meaning. The two main purposes of this handout are to explain
what a phrase is and to demonstrate the usefulness (and intuitive appeal) of the phrase in
linguistic analysis. This handout is to be seen as an appendix to the two handouts “How to
analyse simple English sentences” and “How to identify and analyse English phrases”.
For most people language is simply words that we combine into sentences. Although
this is partly true, we also have structures above the word, but below the sentence. The types
of structures that we are talking about are ‘phrases’ and ‘clauses’.
A simplified account of the relationship between the different language elements is to
say that words are used to form phrases, phrases are used to form clauses, and clauses are
used to form sentences. This hierarchy seems to imply, for instance, that we need more than
one word to form a phrase and more than one clause to form a sentence, but this is not at all
correct. Although phrases certainly can be bigger than a word (and often are), and sentences
can have more than one clause, some phrases contain only one word and quite a few
sentences consist of only one clause.1
Lets consider some examples, before things get really confusing. The sentence in
example (1) consists of three words, namely cats, like and mice.

(1) Cats like mice.

Cats and mice are both nouns, while like is a verb. When we do a functional analysis of this
sentence, we say that cats is the subject, like is the predicate verb and mice is the object (see
“How to analyse simple English sentences”) . If all sentences were like this one, we would not

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We will concentrate on phrases in this handout. Clauses will have to be dealt with elsewhere.

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need to complicate our lives with concepts such as phrase. However, we often need to express
things that are a little more complex than example (1). Say, for instance, that we want to
restrict the referents in (1) by using adjectives such as hungry and fat, as in (2).

(2) Hungry cats like fat mice.

We now end up with five words, but we have basically the same situation as we described
using (1). However, we are now talking about a particular type of cats (hungry ones) and a
particular type of mice (fat ones). If we simply analyse this as five words strung together, we
miss the fact that the adjective hungry is connected much more closely to cats than to the rest
of the sentence and that fat is much more closely connected to mice than to the other words in
the sentence. To capture this difference in relation between the different words, we describe
the sentence in (2) as having five words which make up three phrases, as follows: Hungry
cats = noun phrase, like = verb phrase fat mice = noun phrase. Together these phrases form a
sentence.
Now you might wonder how like, which is a single verb, can be a phrase. As was
mentioned at the beginning of this handout, phrases do not need to contain several words. The
logic behind this is that if a single word has the same distributional and functional
possibilities as more complex phrases, then that word is also called a phrase. The number of
phrases in (1) is therefore exactly the same as the number of phrases in (2). The phrases in (1)
are Cats = noun phrase likes = verb phrase, mice = noun phrase. Verbs, adjectives and adverbs
often form a phrase on their own, but only certain nouns can form noun phrases without
determiners. Depending on how much information we need to provide for someone to
understand what we are referring to, the noun phrase can be either a single word or quite a
large number of words. In most cases the single common noun Superman would be enough to
identify the car thief in (3).

(3) Superman stole my car.

However, if the person we spoke to do not know who Superman is we would have to say
something like (4).

(4) A muscular guy in blue tights stole my car.

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In (3) the subject is the noun phrase Superman i.e. a single proper noun, in (4) the subject is
the noun phrase a muscular guy in blue tights i.e. a complex structure of seven words. But
both constituents serve the same function in the sentences (subject) and both are noun
phrases, but they have very different internal structure.
Since clause elements like subjects, predicate verbs, objects etc. are always either
phrases or subordinate clauses, one way of trying to establish the different phrase boundaries
is to try to identify the different functional elements in the sentence (see “How to analyse
simple English sentences” for extensive use of this method). The easiest way is probably to
ask “who did what to whom” kinds of questions, i.e. if we want to find out what the subject is
in (4), you ask “who stole my car?" and the answer would be “a muscular guy in blue tights".
We can then use the fact that most subjects and objects are noun phrases as a way to identify
what elements are noun phrases.
However, when we try to identify all the noun phrases in sentence (4) we immediately
realise that if we only look at the phrases that function as clause elements, we will miss some
phrases; in our example we would miss the phrase blue tights. This means that we must also
be aware of the fact that phrases are not only part of sentences but they are also part of other
phrases (see “How to identify and analyse phrases in English”). In (4) the noun phrase blue
tights is part of the prepositional phrase in blue tights, which functions as postmodifier in the
large noun phrase a muscular guy in blue tights. We can consequently analyse a sentence into
its constituents at different levels.
In contrast to clause elements that are always phrases (or subordinate clauses), not all
phrase elements are phrases. We thus have a situation where some phrase elements are
analysed as phrases, whereas other elements are simply instances of a particular word class.
Lets analyse example (4) in detail and we can see how the analysis works.

First level
We can analyse constituents in terms of both their form and their function. Since we are
mainly interested in phrases in this text we will stick to a formal analysis. The first level of
analysis is to divide the sentence into the different phrases. In (4) we have, as mentioned
before, three phrases at the sentence level, A muscular guy in blue tights = noun phrase, stole
= verb phrase, my car = noun phrase. This level should be fairly clear by now.

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Second level
The next step is to look at the different elements of these phrases.

The noun phrase a muscular guy in blue tights

As you can see we have now analysed the subject noun phrase into four constituents. Two are
analysed as individual words (a and guy) and two are analysed as phrases (muscular, in blue
tights) even though one of them is only one word. What is going on here? Again we can
motivate this analysis by referring to the potential expandability of these words. It is not
possible to expand the indefinite article a into a phrase and still have it as the determiner of
the noun phrase a muscular guy in blue tights.
In the same way it is impossible to make guy into a phrase by, for instance add a
determiner to it and still have it as the head of the noun phrase, i.e. we cannot say *a muscular
this guy in blue tights. We can never have a phrase as the head of a phrase; it is a
contradiction in terms. Why do we then say that muscular is an adjective phrase rather than a
single adjective? The reason is that, contrary to a and guy, we can potentially expand
muscular into a complex phrase as in an extremely muscular guy in blue tights or a most
extraordinarily muscular guy in blue tights

The Verb phrase stole

At the first level of analysis (clause level) we analysed stole as a verb phrase. At the second
level, we need to analyse the phrase into its constituents. Since there is only one word in the
phrase it is functionally the head (or Main Verb) and formally analysed as a single (lexical)
verb.

The noun phrase my car

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The object noun phrase has only a determiner and a head, neither of which can be expanded
into complex phrases and thus we classify them as words, not as phrases. Since there are still
two phrases that are not analysed (the adjective phrase muscular and the prepositional phrase
in blue tights, we can actually make a third level of analysis

Third level

The prepositional phrase in blue tights

The adjective phrase muscular

We could then go on to analyse blue tights into its constituents, until we have reached the end
of the analysis, when each and every word has received a formal and a functional label. If you
think that all this seems complicated, you should know that you will normally not be asked to
analyse a sentence at all these levels at the same time in this course.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions about this handout in class!

Good luck!

Fabian & Mats