Phrase
In everyday speech, a phrase may refer to any group of words. In linguistics, a phrase is a group of words (or sometimes a single word) that form a constituent and so function as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence. A phrase is lower on the grammatical hierarchy than a clause.
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Famous quotes containing the word phrase:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Rude am I in my speech,
And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)