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I would like to refer to a part of a sentence which is neither a word nor a phrase, e.g., "I will recognize" in "I will recognize you".

Should I call it an expression, a part of a sentence or something else?

robit
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    I have this problem a lot. I usually say "the string", or sometimes just "the words" or "the section". – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:20
  • If you're not comfortable with "phrase," Have you thought of simply referring to them as "the words?" If there is no strict definition that can be applied, then you are going to have to quote the words anyway because people won't otherwise know what you're talking about. Example: "Place the direct object "you" after the the words "I will recognize" in the main clause." – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:41
  • 'Phrase', for sequence of words, is fine, even if the sequence is not a grammatical constituent.of the sentence. Eg, from "the dog is on the house", 'is on the' is a phrase. – Mitch Jan 13 '16 at 13:06
  • @Mitch Absolutely so. Only problem is in linguistics/grammar essays when you're also using phrase in it's constituent sense. Then you come up with things like "the phrase "is on the" is not a full phrase". Which is, erm, problematic. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 13:09
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    @robit I'd call it a sequence (of words). An ungrammatical string perhaps, or just 'part of a clause'. – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 13:27
  • @Araucaria if the sequence is intended to be a subtree of the parse, isn't that then called a 'constituent'? – Mitch Jan 13 '16 at 13:27
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    @Mitch In general non-grammatical parlance, a phrase can be pretty much anything, but in grammatical terms, there are just six phrasal categories corresponding to their matching lexical categories (parts of speech), so we have: verb, noun, adjective, adverb, preposition and determinative phrases. And they would be constituents. The other lexical categories (subordinator, coordinator and interjection) do not have corresponding grammatical phrases – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 13:56
  • So @BillJ, Araucaria, am I wrong then like Ricky? Does 'phrase' implicitly mean that the sequence is a constituent? Or is that just in linguistics and in non-linguistics phrase can mean any subsequence? – Mitch Jan 13 '16 at 14:38
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    @Mitch Mistaken perhaps. The constituents containing more than one word are called 'phrases' and they are assigned to phrasal categories, e.g. verb phrase, noun phrase, adjective phrase and so on. In a sense, phrases are expansions of the lexical categories (verb, noun, adjective etc) – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 14:54
  • @Mitch To add to what I just said, the OP's sequence I will recognize is an ungrammatical string because an object is obligatory with "recognize" here for it to be grammatical. – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 15:16
  • @BillJ OK. So then is there a good answer for the OP, since it is presumably not 'phrase'? – Mitch Jan 13 '16 at 15:50
  • @Mitch Yes, it's an 'ungrammatical string'. – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 15:58
  • @BillJ In the interests of accuracy, did you mean 'not necessarily grammatical sequence of words from a sentence'? – Mitch Jan 13 '16 at 18:21
  • @Mitch The OP's sequence, I would say, was a 100% ungrammatical string because the verb recognize requires an object to be grammatical. – BillJ Jan 13 '16 at 18:31

4 Answers4

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Every linguist has this problem, especially in talking about syntax to non-linguists.
I only use the term phrase to refer to constituents; but there is syntax for non-constituents, too.

Conversational Deletion, for instance, chews away at the beginning of a sentence,
producing utterrances like these, which lack some initial sequence of predictable words:

  • Gotta go now.
  • See you next Tuesday.
  • No need to get upset about it.
  • Ever get to Toledo, look me up.
  • Good thing we didn't run into anybody we know.
  • Last person I expected to meet was Harry.

What gets deleted varies considerably, and isn't limited to one type of word or construction.
Instead, it's just the little words at the beginning that get deleted.

What to call that sequence?

I'd call it a string, which simply refers to any series of successive words. YMMV

Community
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John Lawler
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A phrase is:

a sequence of two or more words arranged in a grammatical construction and acting as a unit in a sentence.

(from dicitonary.reference.com)

"Two" here means the shortest possible unit in a sentence. All clauses are phrases; but not all phrases are clauses.

In music, two or more notes played in succession are a group; anything more than two can be a theme, a grand theme, a leitmotif, a melody, and so forth. All of those are groups. But you can't have a theme consisting of just two notes, or a melody of merely three.

Mitch
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Ricky
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the answer you're looking for is a 'clause'

Alex Schwartz
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The definition of "phrase" is any grouping of two or more words. As such, if it's language, it's either a word or a phrase. It could be more than a phrase, like a clause, but it will always at least be a phrase if more than one word is present.

"I will recognize" is a phrase that is a subject-verb pair. The subject is "I." The verb is "will recognize."

Definition of a PHRASE in grammar:

A phrase is two or more words...Phrases can be very short or quite long.

Benjamin Harman
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  • But not if you're already using the word phrase with its grammar meaning elsewhere though. You can't say "The phrase the big is not a complete phrase" for example. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:21
  • In grammar, there word "phrase" is used over and over. There are many kinds of phrases: noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, infinitive phrase, finite phrase, non-finite phrase, participle phrase, gerund phrase, absolute phrase, and many more. The word "phrase" is not limited to one other use in a context. – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:24
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    All of those terms use "phrase" with the same meaning. They are chunks of words which have a single syntactic function within a larger phrase or clause. The OP's point is that within their sentence "I will recognize" is not a phrase in this sense of the term. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:28
  • Well, unless it's a fused modifier head it won't be understood as a noun phrase. We'd normally require a noun for that. But the point is clear, surely. Within the sentence "The big cat ate food", the string The big is not a phrase. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:29
  • It's still a phrase. A phrase is any group of two or more words. It's not one of these kinds of phrase, and maybe it's not a kind of phrase. It still is generically a phrase. – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:30
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    I deleted my response to "the big." I thought that you were using "big" as a noun, as it can be a noun. It wasn't until after I hit enter that I realized what you were getting at. You were pairing an article with an adjective to create a generic phrase, to create a phrase that isn't otherwise defined within grammar. – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:31
  • Absolutely it is a phrase in the non-syntax sense of the word. but I think the OP might wish to know what term they can use in a context where "phrase" has this grammatical sense in particular. It wouldn't be surprising seeing as this is a site for linguists. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:32
  • It's a phrase in the syntax sense. A phrase in grammar is simply two or more words together. I'm not going to join the discussion chat. I don't have any more to say about this. – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:33
  • Yes, exactly so! That was what I was trying angle at. I get your general point that phrase has a more general non-technical,and also more widely used meaning. I just am not sure if that's what the OP was angling at himself, hence my original comment - which was just an observation, not a criticism :) – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:34
  • By the way, that isn't my downvote there! I think your answer is reasonable. – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:35
  • @Araucaria : Thanks. Because of what you said, I added the definition of "phrase" according to grammar to my answer. That way the OP isn't confused between the dictionary definition and the grammatical definition. – Benjamin Harman Jan 13 '16 at 12:36
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    I don't think a professional grammarian would agree with that definition ... I preferred it before. I don't mind deleting all my comments, if you'd like to return it to its former glory? I'll even give you an upvote! (you're on +1, -1 at the moment). – Araucaria - Him Jan 13 '16 at 12:37