Grammar for Real People, Part 2: Sentences, Phrases, and Clauses · 12:16am Feb 25th, 2016
Part 1: Magic and Science
Part 2: You Are Here!
Part 3: Phrase Functions and Parse
Part 4-1: Modifier Confusion
Part 4-2: Specifier Logic
Part 4-3: Heavy Complements
Part 4-4: Positive/Negative Unity (The Truth Behind “Double-Negatives")
Part 4-5: Scripts and Sleepy Phrases (The Truth Behind “Passive Voice”)
Part 4-6: Script Details (Coming Soon)
TL;DR section at the bottom, you jerk.
Sentences
So last time we established how "noun+verb" does not a real sentence make, and we looked a little at why that's even a thing, and what the real definition is.
In the modern linguistic world, the two basic components of a sentence are called the determiner and the tense indicator. If those sound really technical, I'm afraid I have to warn you that there's a lot more linguistic technobabble where that came from. But the point of these blogs is to ELI5, so I'll do my best to keep things simple. For now, just remember that a sentence has two core parts: a pointer (determiner) that establishes what you're talking about, and an assertion (tense indicator) that expresses what you're saying about that thing.
Now these two things alone still make for a pretty bare-bones sentence, but at least it does make a complete sentence. "He does," "You can," "Some might," "Those will," and so on. Notice that these two-word sentences don't use "real" nouns, like "wood" or "wire" in the last post. Instead, they use pointing words, or words that indicate something that has its own, "real" noun. In the same way, the second word in each sentence, the tense indicator or assertion word, is another pointing word, but this time for a "real" verb instead of a noun. Sentences like these only really work if the nouns and verbs being pointed to are already established beforehand.
The differences in the ways these two word types "point" to their respective "real" words goes beyond simply what type of word they point to. A determiner might be used in place of a noun that was already established (like a traditional pronoun), but it could also be a specifying word that says exactly what (or how many, or which one, etc.) we're talking about, with an invisible real word.
"Some (dogs) might,"
"Those (ones) will."
(In fact, the same thing is actually happening in both types of determiner. "He" might look like it's taking the place of, say, Charlie, but in reality it's just another specifying word. "He does" actually has an invisible "Charlie" in it, assuming Charlie is who you're talking about. Invisible words happen a lot and we'll talk about them more, but you don't really have to worry about this one.)
Tense indicators (or tense inflections, as they're more often called when not more than one word long), like the name suggests, establish the tense of their real verb. And that goes beyond just past/present/future/infinitive, it also covers intent, probability, confirmation, and a whole bunch of other things. Put simply, they link verbs to their subjects.
"I will go."
"I can go."
"I must go."
"I did go."
So those are the two basic cores of any sentence, ever. (By the way, reversing them forms a question. "Will you?" "Does he?") But the funny thing is that even though we can define them as types of words, both of them can actually be made up of multiple words. "(These stupid people) (must all be doomed)." That's because they are both types of words and phrase functions.
There are actually seven word types and seven phrase functions, but we really don't need to talk about all of them, especially the word types. Most of them are familiar enough (A-type descriptive words like adverbs and adjectives, nouns, verbs, etc.) and the others we'll get to later on anyway.
But before we move on to phrase functions, let's talk about phrases themselves.
Phrases
A phrase is basically a little sentence. It might be part of a larger sentence or it might not, but any larger sentence can be considered a big, complicated phrase. (Fulfilling a phrase function with a smaller phrase is the seventh phrase function, by the way, called recursion. It's not really important.)
The core parts of a phrase (and another way of looking at a sentence) are the head and... something else. See, the thing about phrases is that they have a lot more range than sentences. There are a lot ways to make a phrase than a sentence, and phrases can have any number of different appearances and structures.
But they all have one thing in common: a head.
The phrase head is always one word, and it's the hinge word or the core word of the whole thing, as the name suggests. If you were to strip away every word in a phrase one-by-one, trying to preserve the basic meaning of the phrase as long as you could, the head word would be the last to go.
"Mary had a little lamb."
"I do have to wonder if this will happen."
"All dogs will go to heaven."
Those were all complete-sentence examples, and you'll notice the head in each of them was the T-I (tense inflection) word. That's because pretty much any complete sentence is also a T-I Phrase (pretty much every word type can have its own phrase), which basically means that it is built around a T-I word.
Smaller phrases that aren't complete sentences are defined by their head's word type. Noun phrases ("real boy") have noun heads (boy), verb phrases ("go long") have verb heads (go), and so on.
Take a break here and go over to whatever other tab you have open right now, and take a look at the first sentence or phrase your eyes go to. See if you can find the head word for that sentence/phrase. If it's a bigger sentence, try to find a phrase inside it, and then find the head of that phrase. You can go on with this, too. Learning to quickly identify the head words of sentences and phrases is the first step to truly understanding English grammar.
Clauses
As phrases are to sentences, clauses are to phrases. More or less, anyway.
Clauses are a little harder to wrap your head around at first (for me, at least), but they're actually very simple. A clause is a basic two-word sentence (a determiner and a tense inflection) used in a phrase.
"He must go or else we will all die."
(Word Type #6 is the Clause Marker, or C-type word, and there are actually only four of them: that, whether, if, and for. They're always followed by a clause.
"That we might,"
"Whether we should go,"
"If he does,"
"For you to think,")
Another thing about clauses is that they can only be followed by verbs or verb phrases, because they come with a built-in T-I head.
"He must go."
"Who can free us."
"It will oak tree."
All this stuff might seem confusing and useless right now, but trust me, with this under your belt the rest will be super easy.
For now, make sure you take away that grammar revolves around tense (the T-I words) and heads.
Cool. Now that we have stuff to build off of, let's talk about stuff you can actually use.
TL;DR
Sentences
A sentence is, at minimum, a word or phrase that indicates what you are talking about, and a word or phrase that expresses the rest of the thought about that thing. Simple words like "he" and "does" make much more sense in these roles than regular nouns and verbs (like "Charlie" and "play," which don't make a real sentence together, even when used in the same context as "he does"), and can get a lot more information across, especially with the "assertion" word.
Phrases
A sentence is a big phrase, and can include smaller phrases. A phrase is also made of two parts, though only one of them is always the same for every phrase, and that is the head, which is the single word that the rest of the phrase hinges on. Complete sentences always have an "assertion" word head.
Clauses
A clause is a simple, two-word sentence that is used in a phrase. The four words "that," "whether," "if," and "for" can only be followed by a clause, and clauses can only be followed by verbs or verb phrases.
I need to figure out a good way to share these so that more people read them.
3775763 I wish so hard that that was a feature of blogs. I guess I should just copy the links to some doc somewhere.
There's a great blog series I found once that explored Equestria's culture and economics that I really want to find again, but I can't. I really regret not saving that link now.
3775770 If you remember part of it you can probably find it using the blog search.
3775773 Oh believe me, I've tried. I'm sure I'll try again when the need comes, but for now I can live with it.