Talk:Phrase

Theory

An interesting issue that has arisen is the distinction between a complement and adjunct.

In the phrase white house or house at the end of the street, the part of the phrase other than the head (house) acts as a adjunct to the head.

In the phase end of the street, the part of the phase other than the head (end) acts as an complement of head.

What is the difference? May be it's that I can imagine a house without its adjunct, but not an end without its complement.

-- Karl Palmen --

I appreciate the need to give informal, easy-to-understand definitions, however I think that some of the stuff on the page now is inaccurate. You see a phrase is something said to person such as bomey.comy which is a phrase originated from California. It is a ceratain group of words said and widely used.

the house at the end of the street, though it is a noun phrase, does not "act as a noun". "House" is a noun, you can say a house of children, but you cannot say *a the house the end of the street of children. House at the end of the street, though it is a constituent of the sentence, is not a phrase, at least not as in the linguistic sense, it's not really grammatical by itself in English; it needs some specifier like the to be a complete syntactic phrase.

at the end of the street does not act as an adjective. Both the adjective given in the text and at the end of the street have the same syntactic function (an adjunct), but I don't see how you can say that the prepositional phrase acts as an adjective. There are many syntactic tests that can be performed which clearly show the difference.

end of the street is not a phrase for the same reason that house at the end of the street is not.

As to the difference between complements and adjuncts, I intend to write articles on the two subjects sometime soon. The difference is syntactic, but briefly, a complement is generally very specific to its head, and a head generally imposes strict conditions on what kinds of complements it can take whereas adjuncts can generally modify almost any head. white and at the end of the street are adjuncts and of the street is a complement. The best test to distinguish them is to note that you can say something like Which house? The white one and Which house? The one at the end of the street, but you can't say Which end? *The one of the street.

-- AdamRaizen --

Is syntactic properties the same as syntactic categories?

-- Karl Palmen --

A syntactic property is a property of a syntactic structure, such what type of a construction in can appear in, etc. It might be different from a syntactic category in some cases, I think. --- AdamRaizen --

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The bulk of the article seems to assume that Head-Driven Phase Structure grammar is the only possible valid context for use of the term as it applies to grammars. This POV seems to be the underpinning of discussion above as well. I would like to consider qualifying those sections as such and reintroducing some more common senses of the term. --Tabor-- 21:43, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Actually, there's nothing at all HPSG specific about the article. The assumption that sentences can be divided up into headed "phrases" is shared by an enormous number of grammatical theories; it's not exclusive to HPSG. --Cadr-- 06:23, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A phrase is a widely used expression using a specific group of words. Such as some people say "Whats up dog." 4, November 2006

-- Jordanzezima --

Constituents

Add constituent! --Suspekt-- 13:41, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Should it not be more clear that it isn't a sentence?

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