Phrase

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In everyday conversations, a sentence may be a group of words, often carrying a special idiomatic meaning; in this sense is roughly the same as expression . In linguistic analysis, phrases are a group of words (or perhaps one word) that function as constituents in sentence syntax, one unit in the grammar hierarchy. A phrase usually appears in a clause, but it may also be for a phrase to be a clause or to contain a clause in it.

Video Phrase

General and technical use

There is a distinction between the general use of the phrase phrase and its technical use in linguistics. In common usage, the phrase is usually a group of words with special idiomatic or other important meanings, such as "all rights reserved", "economical with the truth", "kicking a bucket", and the like. These can be euphemisms, maxims or proverbs, fixed expressions, figures, etc.

In grammatical analysis, especially in syntactical theory, phrases are groups of words, or sometimes one word, that play a certain role in the grammatical structure of a sentence. It does not have to have a special meaning or meaning, or even beyond the sentences analyzed, but must function there as a complete grammatical unit. For example, in the phrase Yesterday I saw an orange bird with a white neck , the words orange bird with white neck forming what is called a noun phrase, or a defining phrase in several theories, which functions as a sentence object.

The syntax theorists differ in what they perceive as phrases; however, it is usually necessary to become a constituent of a sentence, as it should include all dependents of the unit it contains. This means that some expressions that can be called phrases in ordinary language are not phrases in a technical sense. For example, in the sentence I can not stand with Alex , words that are prepared (meaning 'tolerate') can be referred to in common language as phrases (English expressions like this often called the phrasal verb) but technically they do not form complete phrases, because they do not include Alex , which is a complement of the preposition with .

Maps Phrase

Head and Loans

In grammatical analysis, most phrases contain keywords that identify the linguistic features and features of the phrase; This is known as the word head, or head. The head syntax category is used to name the phrase category; for example, a phrase whose head is a noun is called a noun phrase. The words left in the phrase are called heads.

In the following phrase, the word head, or head, is bolded:

too slowly - Adverb phrase (AdvP); head is a description word

very happy - Adjective phrase (AP); head is an adjective

big dinosaur - Noun phrase (NP); head is a noun (but see below for determiner phrase analysis)

on lunch - prepositional phrase (PP); head is a preposition

watch TV - phrase Verb> (VP); head is a verb

The five examples above are the most common of these types of phrases; but, with head and dependent logic, others can be produced on a regular basis. For example, subordinate phrases:

before what happened - Subordinator Phrase (SP); head is a subordinate conjunction - independent subordinate clause

With linguistic analysis, this is a group of words that qualifies as a phrase, and the headword gives the syntactic name, "subordinator", to the grammatical category of the whole phrase. But this phrase, "before it happens," is more commonly classified in other grammar, including traditional English grammar, as a subordinate clause (or dependent clause); and then labeled not as a phrase, but as a clause.

Most of the syntax theories see most of the phrases have heads, but some unrecognized phrases are known. The phrase that has no head is known as an exocentric, and the phrase with the head is endocentric.

Functional categories

Some modern syntax theories introduce certain functional categories where the head of a phrase is some word or functional item, which may even be veiled, that is, it may be a theoretical construct that does not need to appear explicitly in the sentence.

For example, in some theories, phrases such as men are taken to have the determiner the as its head, rather than the noun man - This is then classified as a determinant phrase ( DP), not a noun phrase (NP). When a noun is used in a sentence without an explicit determiner, the zero determiner (secret) can be expressed. For a full discussion, see the Determiner phrase.

Another type is the inflexional phrase, in which (for example) a limited verb phrase is taken to be a complement of a functional, possibly sealed head (denoted INFL) that should encode the requirement for a verb for inflection - for agreement with the subject (which is the determinant of INFL) , for tense and aspect, etc. If these factors are treated separately, a more specific category may be considered: tense phrase (TP), where the verb phrase is a complement of the "tense" abstract element; aspect phrase ; phrase agreement and so on.

Many syntax and grammatical theories illustrate sentence structures using the phrase 'tree', which gives schematics how words in a sentence are grouped and related to each other. Trees show the words, phrases, and, sometimes, clauses that make up the sentence. Any combination of words that match the complete subtree can be viewed as a phrase.

There are two established and competing principles for building trees; they produce 'constituency' and 'dependency' trees and both are illustrated here using sentence examples. The constituent based tree is on the left and the tree based on the dependence is on the right:

The tree on the left is a grammar of phrase grammar, based on constituents, and the tree on the right is the grammar dependency. The node label in the two trees marks the syntactic categories of different constituents, or elements of words, of sentences.

In the constituent tree each phrase is marked with a phrasal node (NP, PP, VP); and there are eight phrases identified by the phrase structure analysis in the sample sentence. On the other hand, the dependency tree identifies a phrase by a node that provides dependence on, or dominates, another node. And, using dependency analysis, there are six phrases in the sentence.

Trees and calculations show that different syntax theories differ in the combination of words qualified as phrases. Here the constituent tree identifies three phrases not owned by the dependency tree, namely: the house at the end of the road , the end of the road , and the end . Further analysis, including the plausibilities of both grammars, can be made empirically by applying constituency tests.

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Confusion: phrases in syntax theory

The general use of the term "phrase" is different from that used by some syntax phrase structure theory. The daily understanding of the phrase is that it consists of two or more words, while depending on the syntactic theory one uses, individual words may or may not qualify as phrases. The trees in the previous section, for example, do not see individual words as phrases. The syntax theory that uses the X-bar theory, on the contrary, will recognize many individual words as a phrase. This practice is because the sentence structure is analyzed in a universal schema, the X-bar scheme, which looks at each head as projecting at least three levels of structure: minimal, middle, and maximal levels. So an individual noun (N), like Susan in Susan laughing , will project up to medium level (N ') and max level (NP, noun phrase), meaning that Susan qualifies as a phrase. (The subject slot in the sentence must be filled by the NP, so whether the subject is a multi-word unit such as tall woman , or one that performs the same function, as Susan , this called NPs in these theories.) The concept of this phrase is a source of confusion for students of syntax.

Many other syntax theories do not use X-bar schemes and are therefore less likely to confront this confusion. For example, grammatical dependencies do not recognize phrase structures in a way that is related to grammatical phrase structure and therefore do not recognize individual words as phrases, a fact that is obvious in the grammatical tree of dependencies above and below.

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Verb phrase (VP) as the source of controversy

Most if not all syntax theories acknowledge the verb phrase (VPs), but they can be very different in the type of verb phrase they are positioning. The phrase structure grammar recognizes finite verb phrases and non-finite verb phrases as constituents. Grammatical dependency, by contrast, recognizes only non-finite verb phrases as constituents. The difference is illustrated by the following examples:

The Republicans can nominate Newt . - Limited VP in bold

The Republicans can nominate Newt . - Non-finite VP in bold

The syntax tree of this sentence is next:

The constituent tree on the left shows a finite verb string can nominate Newt as a phrase (= constituent); this corresponds to VP ₁ . Instead, this same string is not displayed as a phrase in the dependency tree on the right. Note that the two trees, however, take a non-restricted VP of nominate Newt to be a phrase, since in both trees nominate Newt in accordance with the complete subtree.

Because there is disagreement over the limited VP status (whether they are constituents or not), empirical consideration is required. The grammar experts can (again) use constituency tests to explain the controversy. Constituent tests are a diagnostic for identifying sentence constituents and therefore it is important to identify phrases. The results of most constituent tests do not support the existence of limited VP constituencies.

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See also

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Note

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References

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External links

• Phrase Search - The meaning and origin of phrases, utterances, and idioms
• Phrases.net - A large collection of common phrases that can be heard and translated into multiple languages.
• phraseup * - a writing assistant who helps complete sentences by finding missing words that we can not remember.
• Fraze.it - ​​â € <â €

Source of the article : Wikipedia