The Bridge: Phrases
Phrases are the building blocks of clauses and sentences. Without understanding how they work, it is almost impossible to make a correctly formed sentence in any language.
First off, look at
this sentence and decide what each word is doing and what
you would call them. Then click here for the answer. |
Coffee often keeps me awake at night
Here's the simple way by dividing the sentence into words of different classes: | ||||||
subject noun | adverb | verb | object noun | adjective | preposition | noun |
Coffee | often | keeps | me | awake | at | night |
That is not, however, the end of the story because we can produce an alternative phrase analysis which is more useful for teaching purposes. It looks like this:
Here's the phrase analysis: | ||||
subject noun phrase | verb phrase | object noun phrase | adjective phrase | prepositional phrase |
Coffee | often keeps | me | awake | at night |
You will see that three of these phrases consist of only one word.
In language analysis one word counts as a phrase.
In a strict analysis, often keeps is not a verb phrase
because a verb phrase can only contain verbs. Therefore, for
example, has kept, was keeping, kept, may have kept, wanted to
keep etc. all count as verb phrases because they only contain
verb forms. However, because adverbs are so closely related to
verbs, it generally makes sense to classify the verb plus an adverb
as a verb phrase for teaching purposes.
Now try
this for yourself with a slightly more complicated but
structurally parallel sentence. Then click here for the answer. |
Drinking too much coffee very often keeps me and my husband fully awake all through the night
We can refine this analysis further by looking at each phrase and seeing what are called its constituents. This makes the analysis more accurate because it reveals the internal nature of the phrases. A verb phrase, for example, usually contains only verb forms as we saw above so calling very often keeps a verb phrase in itself is actually inaccurate. We do it like this:
Here's the phrase analysis: | |||||||||||
subject noun phrase | verb phrase | object noun phrase | adjective phrase | prepositional phrase | |||||||
noun phrase | noun phrase | adverb phrase | verb phrase | object pronoun phrase | coordinating conjunction | noun phrase | adverb phrase | adjective phrase | determiner | preposition | prepositional complement noun phrase |
Drinking | too much coffee | very often | keeps | me | and | my husband | fully | awake | all | through | the night |
Phrases, in other words, can exist within other phrases. Above, we have a noun phrase which contains two noun phrases, a verb phrase made up of an adverb phrase and a verb, another noun phrase made up of a pronoun, a coordinating conjunction and another noun phrase and a prepositional phrase which comes in three parts.
Making sense for learners |
There are some good reasons to analyse at the level of phrases rather than words when presenting structures to learners:
- It is actually quite rare for phrases to consist of only one
word unless they are proper-noun subjects or objects.
Common, countable noun phrases, in particular, are minimally made up
of a determiner and a noun and frequently contain adjectives.
Identifying the main noun and the grammatical function of the
whole phrase is crucial to understanding. It makes sense,
therefore to understand
The man with the dog ...
as the subject of
... was walking in the park
rather than to try to break the noun phrase into five separate words and understand them individually before reassembling the meaning. - There is some evidence that all languages operate in a
similar manner, combining phrases to make longer clauses and
sentences so, intuitively, phrase rather than word analysis will
be accessible for all learners. Most languages (no, not
all) will contain equivalents of what are called the big
four:
Noun phrases
Verb phrases
Adverb phrases
Adjective phrases - When it comes to production, getting learners away from word-level analysis and aware of phrases they can use in parallel ways makes their speaking and writing more impressive, more expressive and more fluent.
However, in order to teach phrases, we need to know how they can be analysed. The simplest and most usual way is to identify three parts. We'll use this phrase as our example and chop it into three parts:
The young woman in the corner
- The main noun here, without which the phrase makes no sense, is called the Head and it consists of the noun woman. Removing the head from a phrase leaves nonsense. Try it.
- The two words before the Head are called, obviously enough,
the Pre-head and they are a determiner (the article the)
and an adjective (young). Pre-heads can be quite
long so we could have had, for example:
The young, attractive but obviously bored woman ...
The Head remains the same. - The last three word constitute, again rather obviously, the
Post-head. In this case, the Post-head is the
prepositional phrase made up of in plus its noun-phrase
complement, the corner. In some analyses, the
corner is described as the object of the preposition
because that is how it acts. We'll avoid that description,
reserving object and subject for verbs and verb phrases.
Again, Post-heads can be quite long and are often relative pronoun or relative adverb clauses so we could have had:
... woman who is standing in the corner wearing a red dress and drinking a cocktail
The Head remains the single noun woman.
Now it's your turn to do some phrase constituent analysis.
There are three parts to all these phrases. When you have identified them, click on the for the answers. |
often
speaks out of turn |
The Head: speaks
(a verb with its third-person inflexion)
The Pre-head: often (the adverbial of time) The Post-head: out of turn (the prepositional phrase adverbial) (Anything that modifies a verb is an adverbial, incidentally.) |
the long-awaited train for London |
The Head: train
(a countable noun)
The Pre-head: long-awaited (a compound adjective) The Post-head: for London (the prepositional phrase noun modifier) |
these three exceedingly beautiful,
Chinese vases |
The Head: vases (a countable noun made
plural)
The Pre-head: these three (a demonstrative pre-determiner and a numeral determiner) The Post-head: the adjective phrase made up of an adverb, exceedingly, a gradable adjective beautiful and a non-gradable classifier Chinese |
in front
of the house and slightly to the left |
Two Heads (because there are two phrases): in front
of (a complex preposition) and to (a
simple preposition)
The Pre-head: none for the first phrase but an adverb in the second phrase, slightly. The Post-heads: the noun phrase the house and the noun phrase the left |
extremely
carefully downhill |
The Head:
carefully (an adverb)
The Pre-head: the amplifying adverb extremely The Post-head: the adverb of place downhill |
The very
beautiful French clocks that I hopefully took to the auction
didn't sell for very much |
A bit more complicated because we have multiple phrases
and, therefore, multiple Heads etc.
The Head: clocks (an countable plural noun) The Pre-head: the very beautiful French (determiner + adverb + adjective + classifier) The Post-head: that I hopefully took to the auction (a relative clause with a Post-head adverbial, verb phrase and a prepositional phrase) The whole of that noun phrase constitutes the subject of the next verb. Head: sell Pre-head: didn't (the negative marker in English using the operator do) Post-head: for very much (a prepositional phrase with the Head for and the noun-phrase complement Post-head very much) |
So how does this help? |
We averred above that this is a way of making sense for learners.
How?
Well:
- If learners can pick out the heads of phrases when they read
or hear anything, they can easily ignore pre- and post-heads
that they don't understand. For example, in:
The government-sponsored scheme to help old people remain independently at home proved hugely expensive
We have:
Head of a noun phrase (scheme)
Head of a verb phrase (proved)
Head of an attributive adjective phrase (expensive)
Identifying the Heads allows the meaning to be extracted:
scheme proved expensive
and that's almost all you need to know.
For obvious reasons, this makes listening and reading a surer and more reliable event. - If learners can be encouraged to introduce pre- and
post-heads in what they say or write, it makes their production
more accurate, more fluent and more interesting so instead of:
My town is on the Rhine. The town is old and beautiful. It is a good place to visit in the summer.
we might get:
My ancient home town which is on Germany's major River Rhine is a beautiful place to visit in the summer.
That's not difficult to do but learners need careful training to get the trick of pre- and post-modifying the heads of their phrases so that they don't write three sentences when one will do.
Take a final test on some of all this. |
If that's all clear enough to you, you can go on to the guides below (on the right). If you still feel slightly confused, try the links on the left.
Guides in other areas | |
Initial plus essential guides | In-service guides |
essentials of subjects and objects | phrases |
essentials of modification | an overview of modification |
essentials of relative clauses | prepositional phrases |
essentials of sentence grammar | relative pronoun clauses |
sentences and clauses index | syntax index |