Phrase

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In grammar, a phrase (Greek φράση, sentence, expression, see also strophe) is a group of words that functions as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence.

For example the house at the end of the street (example 1) is a phrase. It acts like a noun. It contains the phrase at the end of the street (example 2), which acts like an adjective. Example 2 could be replaced by white, to make the phrase the white house. Examples 1 and 2 contain the phrase the end of the street (example 3) which acts like a noun. It could be replaced by the cross-roads to give the house at the cross-roads.

Each phrase has a word called its head which links it to the rest of the sentence. In English the head is often the first word of the phrase.

Phrases may be classified by the type of head they take

Prepositional phrase (PP) with a preposition as head (e.g. in love, over the rainbow). Languages that use postpositions instead have postpositional phrases. The two types are sometimes commonly referred to as adpositional phrases.
Noun phrase (NP) with a noun as head (e.g. the black cat, a cat on the mat)
Verb phrase (VP) with a verb as head (e.g. eat cheese, jump up and down)
Adjectival phrase with an adjective as head (e.g. full of toys)
Adverbial phrase with adverb as head (e.g. very carefully)

1 Formal definition
2 Complexity
3 Semiotic approaches to the concept of "phrase"
4 Other uses

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Formal definition

A phrase is a syntactic structure which has syntactic properties derived from its head.

For example the house at the end of the street is a noun phrase. Its head is house, and its syntactic properties come from that fact. It contains prepositional phrase at the end of the street, which acts as an adjunct. At the end of the street could be replaced by another adjunct, such as white, to make the phrase the white house. Of the street, another prepositional phrase, acts as a complement of end. Each phrase has a word called its head which gives it its syntactic properties.

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Complexity

A complex phrase consists of several words, whereas a simple phrase consists of only one word. This terminology is especially often used with verb phrases:

simple past and present are simple verb, which require just one verb
complex verb have one or two aspects added, hence require additional two or three words

"Complex", which is phrase-level, is often confused with "compound", which is word-level. However, there are certain phenomena that formally seem to be phrases but semantically are more like compounds, like "women's magazines", which has the form of a possessive noun phrase, but which refers (just like a compound) to one specific lexeme (i.e. a magazine for women and not some magazine owned by a woman).

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Semiotic approaches to the concept of "phrase"

In more semiotic approaches to language, such, as for instance, the more cognitivist versions of construction grammar, a phrasal structure is not only a certain formal combination of word types whose features are inherited from the head. Here each phrasal structure also expresses some type of conceptual content, be it specific or abstract.

For example prepositional phrases express a figure-ground relation in which the prepositional complement is the ground, the preposition itself specifies the relation, and the precedent element is the figure.

Thus, in semiotic approaches to phrasal structure, a phrase not only has a specific formal configuration, but is also characterized by a recognizable (abstract or specific) semantic content.

See phrase structure rules, syntax, grammar.