The phrase and its general characteristics

Introduction to Syntax.

Syntax is a part of grammar which studies the combinability of words and the structure of sentences. It also studies means of sentence connection and units larger than a sentence. The main object of study in syntax is the communicative unit of the language, i.e. the sentence.

Words within a sentence are grouped into phrases (word-groups, word-clusters, word-combinations).

Example: John and Marry saw an old man crossing the street.

Phrases are sentence constituents. But phrases can be also treated as units built by combining words outside the sentence: a man à an old man; old à very old. Thus the combinability of words, or valency ['veɪlən(t)sɪ] (валентность), can be studied both under syntax and under morphology. One should distinguish between grammatical combinability (syntagmatic relations of classes of words – N + V, Adv + Adj), lexical combinability, or collocability (syntagmatic relations of individual words – green jealousy, but not blue jealousy) and lexico-grammatical combinability (sytnagmatic relations of words – a sudden arrival / explosion / arrest, but not a sudden table).

There are two approaches to the definition of a phrase:

1) A phrase is a unity of two or more notional words (a narrow definition);

2) Any syntactic group of words can be treated as a phrase (a wider definition).

Phrases can be built by combining notional words (Adj + N), notional and functional words (Preposition + Article + Noun), functional words (Prep + Prep – out of). Notional phrases are more independent structurally and semantically, other types function as part of notional phrases.

A phrase is a naming unit. Phrases name different phenomena of the outside word: a round table, yesterday morning, to speak English fluently.

The naming function of the phrase distinguishes it from the sentence, whose main function is communicative. Therefore the structure “N + V” is traditionally excluded from phrases.

A phrase is usually smaller than a sentence, but it may also function as a sentence, and it may be larger than a sentence, as the latter may consist of one word.

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