Syntax: Terms & Concepts
Phrases

Phrase: a word group held tightly together by meaning relationships. The purpose of a phrase is to signal to our reader or listener which concepts we wish to combine. A phrase like 'my new green hat' instructs the listener to combine the concepts that the words in the phrase stand for, in order to refer to a particular object in the world (the hat). A phrase is built around a head word (Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Preposition) and may also have several modifiers in it. Modifiers are expressions that add details of meaning to the head. The modifiers may be special single-word modifiers, or modifiers may be phrases of other types, or they may be clauses (especially relative clauses in noun phrases). In English, modifiers can appear on either side of the head word. This fact -- that phrases and clauses may modify words, and therefore be components of a phrase -- is a special property of human language. It often confuses students new to the study of grammar, although of course such students already construct phrases fluently in their unconscious, everday use of language.

Let us use examples (a) and (b) as components to build a larger phrase, more complex in meaning than its parts:
 

The very intelligent girl looks like a string of words, but when we examine meaning relationships (that is, which concepts combine more closely with which others), we see that that is a very superficial analysis. Very is not saying something about girl; it is saying something about intellligent . So we say it is modifying intelligent. Similarly, the is not saying anything about intelligent, but is letting us know that the girl in question is one that is already known to us, not a girl that has not been mentioned before or that we don't already know. Thus the modifies girl. The whole phrase has three components: modifier the, modifier very intelligent, and head girl. Very intelligent, in turn, is a phrase with two components: modifier very and head intelligent. We could also represent this structure with boxes. Each element of phrase structure gets a box. Modifiers are put into a box with their heads.
 
 

More detail will follow about phrases of different kinds.

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EXERCISE 1: CREATING PHRASES

Make two columns on a sheet of paper, one with five nouns and one with five adjectives of your own choosing. Then take each word and expand it into a phrase by adding determiners (words such as a, the, my, her, some, many, few) to the nouns and qualifiers (words like very, rather, extremely, somewhat, quite) to the adjectives. Then put the phrases together into ten larger phrases. Use the discussion of 'the very intelligent girl' as a model. Silly or serious, doesn't matter!

Example:

Nouns       Adjectives
pudding    solid
birck         mushy

1. That very mushy brick
2. Your extremely solid pudding
3. My somewhat mushy pudding
4. A quite solid brick

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 Phrase Structure

As noted above, there are only two roles in a phrase: head and modifier. Various classes of words can fill these roles. The head of a phrase is a word, and words can fill certain modifier roles in phrases, but modifiers can also be phrases or clauses. In fact, most modifiers in phrases are phrases of other types, as we saw above in the example the very intelligent girl -- very intelligent is an adjective phrase that modifies the head word girl.

Here are some of the major phrase types of English with typical modifiers. This table does not give all possibilities, just some examples. 

Complements

Within the category modifier, we can make a distinction between modifiers and complements. A complement is a modifier that names something that can be considered an essential aspect of the meaning of the phrase's head word. This term is usually reserved for items that occur after the head of a phrase. Take, for example, a verb like 'eat'. A person cannot be said to be engaged in this action unless they take something (typically food) into their mouth and swallow it. If we name the thing eaten in a sentence with this verb, it will be a complement, usually a NP acting as direct object:

Miguel ate the whole pizza.

Noun phrase /direct object / complement of 'eat'

An adjective like 'proud' implies that there is something that the proud individual is proud of; an expression that names this thing is a complement of the adjective. These are usually PPs, for example:

Barbara is very proud of her prize-winning dogs.

Prepositional phrase / complement of 'proud'

In the case of some words, we are obliged to mention one or more complements, or else an ungrammatical sentence of English results. For example, the verb 'put' requires two complements, one a direct-object NP and one an adverbial that names the goal location of the action. The adverbial may be an adverb phrase or a prepositional phrase, or a pro-form.
 

Any sentence that leaves out either or both of the complements is ungrammatical:
*Nguyen put his book.
*Ngyuen put down.
*Nguyen put there.
*Nguyen put.

It is often very difficult to tell the difference between a modifier and a complement. In general, a modifier expresses an idea not essential to the meaning of the head, while the opposite is true of complements. For example, while food is an essential aspect of the meaning of 'eat', making NPs that name the food complements, the time when eating takes place is not essential to the meaning of 'eat', so a time expression after 'eat' is a modifier, not a complement. They look the same, but one has a closer meaning relationship to the head than the other. Consider:

We ate the pizza.

We ate at 3 am.

If you don't eat something, we can't really use the word 'eat' for what you did. But we can use the word without regard to when the eating took place. Non-complement modifiers are viewed as adding rather extraneous information to the phrase.

Typical complements for verbs are direct objects ('hit', 'see'), indirect objects ('give', 'send'), and adverbials ('put'); some verbs also can have subject ('become') or object ('elect') complements. Prepositions have NP complements (called object of the preposition in traditional grammar). As we saw above, adjectives can have PP complements. Nouns can have PP complements, also: in 'a book about the war' the PP 'about the war' is a complement. We know that books are about topics (would a long text between hard covers that wasn't about one unified topic be considered a book?), so naming the topic simply fills in that detail in the meaning of the head.

You will find more detail about notions such as direct object, adverbial in the section entitled Clauses.
 

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