16. The phrase. Types of phrases from syntactical point of view.
There are several understandings of the term phrase:
Prof. Ilyish terms ‘phrase’ every combination of two or more words which is a grammatical unit but is not an analytical form of some word. The constituent elements of a phrase may belong to any part of speech. For instance, they may both be nouns, or one of them may be an adjective and the other a noun, or one of them may be a verb and the other and so on.
Prof. Barkhudarov: a phrase is a combination of two or more notional words, connected by means of subordination, coordination and predicative relation if it cannot function as a sentence: e.g. mother and father.
Different approaches to the study of types of phrases exist.
The 1-st approach is in traditional grammar. It studies such types of phrases as: noun + noun, adjective + noun, noun(common case) + noun, noun(general case) + noun, adjective + noun, verb + noun, verb + adverb, adverb + adjective, adverb + adverb, noun + preposition + noun, adjective + preposition + noun, verb + preposition + noun.
An important question arises concerning the pattern “noun + verb”: e. g. he came, he bought.
Syntactic relations fall under two main heads:
1.Agreement or concord ['kɒŋkɔ:d] (согласование)
2.Government (управление)
By agreement grammarians mean a method of expressing a syntactical relationship, which consists in making the subordinate word take a form similar to the word to which it is subordinate. It can refer only to the category of number: a subordinate word agrees in number with its head word if it has different number form. This is practically found in two words only, the pronouns this and that, which agree in number with their head word: e.g. this tree, these trees.
As
to the problem of agreement of the verb with the noun or pronoun
denoting the subject of the action (a
child plays, children play),
this
is a controversial problem. T
he
fact that sentences like My
family is small, and
My
family are
early risers exist
side by side proves that the
verb can be independent of the noun
in this respect: though the noun is in the singular, the verb may
be in the plural, if the doer is understood to be plural and vice
versa.
By government grammarians understand the use of a certain form of the subordinate word required by the head word, but not coinciding with the form of the head word itself. The only thing that may be termed government in English is the use of the objective case of personal pronouns and of the pronoun who when they are subordinate to a verb or follow a preposition, for instance, the forms me, him, her, us, them, are required if the pronoun follows a verb (e. g. find or invite). The form whom is rather often superseded by the form who in sentences like, Who(m) did you see? Speaking of nouns, the notion of government has become quite uncertain in Modern English. If we look at the forms of the common and the genitive case father and father's we can’t say that a preposition always requires the form of only the common case. For instance, the preposition at can be used with both case forms: e.g. I looked at my father and I spent the summer at my father's.
There is another means of expressing syntactic connection which plays a significant part in modern English. That is enclosure (замыкание). Some element of a phrase is enclosed between two parts of another element. The most widely known case of "enclosure" is the putting of a word between an article and the noun to which the article belongs. Any word or phrase thus enclosed is shown to be an attribute to the noun.
According to the type of relation in a phrase grammarians study phrases from a different angle as well. Another approach to studying phrases is distinguishing syntagmatic groupings: