can be defined as a
syntactically organized group of words of any morphological composition based on any type of syntactic connection .
The difference between the phrase and the sentence is fundamental: the
phrase is a nominative unit which fulfils the function of polynomination denoting a
complex referent (phenomenon of reality) analyzable into its component elements
together with various relations between them; the sentence is a unit of predication
which, naming a certain situational event, shows the relation of the denoted event
towards reality.
General characteristics of the phrase are:
1) A phrase is a means of naming some phenomena or processes, just as a
word is. As a naming unit it differs from a compound word because the number of
constituents in a word-group corresponds to the number of different denotates
(a black bird – a blackbird; a loud speaker – a loudspeaker) .
2) Each component of the word-group can undergo grammatical changes
without destroying the identity of the whole unit:
to see a house - to see houses – saw houses (grammatical modifications of one phrase).
A sentence is a unit with every word having its definite form. A change in
the form of one or more words would produce a new sentence.
3) A word-group is a dependent syntactic unit, it is not a communicative unit
and has no intonation of its own. Intonation is one of the most important features
of a sentence, which distinguishes it from a phrase.
The correlation of the phrase and the sentence is a bit different from that of
other language units. Usually, the sentence is considered a unit of the level higher
than the phrase. However, according to some scholars, eg. Yu. S. Maslov, the
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phrase can be a sentence or a part of a sentence while the sentence can be realized
as a phrase, a group of interconnected phrases and a separate word.