Division of

Adjectives

Upper level:	Stative adjectives		Common adjectives
Lower level:		Qualitative		Relative

Seminar 12

Phrase

1. Definition of the phrase.

Ilyish:

Phrase is every combination of 2 or more words which is a grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of word. The constituent elements of a phrase may belong to any part of speech.

The difference between a phrase and a sentence is a fundamental one. A phrase is a means of naming some phenomena or processes, just as a word is. Each component of a phrase can undergo grammatical changes in accordance with grammatical categories represented in it, without destroying the identity of this phrase.

e.g. write letters – has written a letter, wrote a letter

In a sentence every word has its definite form. A change in the form of one or more words would produce a new sentence.

!!! A phrase as such has no intonation (like a word). Intonation is one of the most important features of a sentence, distinguishing it from a phrase.

2. The study of the phrase in Russian and foreign linguistics.

Иванова, Бурлакова, Почепцов:

Russian Linguistics:

The creation of the theory of a phrase is due to Russian linguists. This theory is connected with such linguists as Фортунатов, Шахматов, Пешковский. All through its development the theory underwent a lot of changes. Until the 50-s the wide understanding of the term “phrase” prevailed. And any syntactically organized group was considered as a phrase, no matter what constituted it.

This point of view is still accepted.

But by the 50-s there appeared in the modern linguistics a new interpretation of this problem, and the term “phrase” acquired an extremely narrow sense and was applied only to those phrases which include not less than 2 notional words, connected by the relations of subordination. Predicative and prepositional groups were excluded from the phrase theory. This point of view was introduced by Vinogradov and was supported by many Russian linguists.

This is characteristic of Russian linguists to bring a word and a phrase together to the maximum.

Though this point of view was not supported by some of linguists (Ilyish, Жирмунский), it became the predominant in the middle of the 20 century, and the traditional understanding of a phrase in the Russian linguistics is restricted to subordinate structures only.

Foreign Linguistics:

The scientific theory on the phrase appeared abroad much later. It acquired its theoretical interpretation only in the 30-s due to an American linguist Leo Bloomfield.

Immediate constituant analysis (I-see analysis)

L. Bloomfield understands a phrase in its wider sense. Each syntactically organized group is a phrase. Accroding to him phrases of any language divide into 2 groups:

1. Parataxis (free relations between the elements)

2. Hypotaxis (dependence between the elements of the phrase):

1. Endocentric phrases – those phrases in which one of the components can function in a larger group, as well as the whole group, e.g. poor John  poor John ran away – John ran away.

2. exocentric phrases - those phrases, in which one of the components can’t replace the whole group in a larger structure:

1. predicative phrases, e.g. John ran away

2. prepositional phrases, e.g. beside John

Bloomfield’s followers developed this scheme and introduced some changes. They added a number of types of phrases and new types of syntactic connections.

An interesting feature of the foreign works on the phrase is that there is no resistant terminology. It is usually called a “phrase”. But not all linguists used it, for example H.Sweet criticized this term. In the 20^th century new terms were introduced: “word group”, “word cluster”.