Phrases: words and slots

At this point in the discussion, we need to comment on the concept of phrase. In everyday usage, the term ‘phrase’ is applied only to sequences of more than one word. This is easily demonstrated with (5), reproduced below as (18a) and (18b).

Examples (18a) and (18b) both contain the phrases (in the everyday sense) to Alan and on Tuesday. In contrast, Barbara in (18a) and them in (18b) do not constitute everyday phrases because they each consist of just one word. In syntactic analysis, a distinction between ‘phrase’ and ‘word’ is observed, but it does not match the everyday distinction since both Barbara and them are treated as phrases. What is meant by ‘phrase’ is a slot in which one or more words can occur, or indeed in which other phrases can occur. In (18b) the phrase them consists of only one word, but the term ‘phrase’ is used because what is being said is ‘Here is a slot in which it is possible for more than one word to occur’. The fact that there is only one word in the slot in this particular example is just an accident; them can be replaced by a longer sequence, say the results of the maths examination sat just before Christmas.

In both (18a) and (18b), the first phrase consists of a single word, Barbara, but this too is an accident of these examples. Barbara could be replaced by Margaret’s hard-working colleague. Likewise, the phrase to Alan contains a noun phrase, Alan – just one word, but it could be replaced by her colleague who was collating the examination marks. And in the phrase on Tuesday, a longer sequence could be substituted for Tuesday, such as the day he forgot his coat and got absolutely drenched.

The above discussion brings to our attention a universal and crucial ambiguity. we have used terms such as ‘noun phrase’ and ‘prepositional phrase’. These terms are applied to words; we talk of looking for such-and-such a noun in the dictionary. They are applied to sequences of words; many dictionaries contain fixed sequences such as a rolling stone. They are also applied, and this is where the ambiguity lies, to the slots in clauses in which particular words or phrases occur. This brings us back to the point made above that when Barbara is labelled a noun phrase the label captures the fact that this single word occupies a slot that could be occupied by a sequence of words, a phrase.