UC 00902: MEANING IN COMMUNICATION CONTEXT LESSON 5: Meaning and Syntax I (Phrase,Clause, Sentence)

STAGES OF MEANINGFUL UNITS

SMALLEST TO BIGGEST UNIT

MORPHEME LEXICON PHRASE CLAUSE SENTENCE SYNTAX

WHAT IS SENTENCE?
Sentences

are made of two parts: the subject and the predicate. The subject is the person or thing that acts or is described in the sentence. The predicate, on the other hand, is that action or description. Complete sentences need both the subject and the predicate.

WHAT IS CLAUSE?
Sentences

can be broken down into clauses. For example: The boy is going to the school, and he is going to eat there. This is a complete sentence composed of two clauses. There are mainly two types of clauses: independent clauses and subordinate clauses.

WHAT IS CLAUSE?
Independent

clauses act as complete sentences, while subordinate clauses cannot stand alone and need another clause to complete their meaning. For example: Independent clause: The boy went to the school. Subordinate clause: After the boy went to the school

WHAT IS PHRASE?
A

group of two or more grammatically linked words that do not have subject and predicate is a phrase. For example: The girl is at home, and tomorrow she is going to the amusement park. You can see that the amusement park is a phrase located in the second clause of the complete sentence above. Phrases act like parts of speech inside clauses. That is, they can act as nouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on.

WHAT IS PHRASE?

A phrase is a collection of words that may have nouns or verbals, but it does not have a subject doing a verb.

The following are examples of phrases: leaving behind the dog smashing into a fence before the first test after the devastation between ignorance and intelligence broken into thousands of pieces because of her glittering smile

In these examples above, you will find nouns (dog, fence, test, devastation, ignorance, intelligence, thousands, pieces). You also have some verbals (leaving, smashing), but in no case is the noun functioning as a subject doing a predicate verb. They are all phrases.

WHAT IS CLAUSE
A clause is a collection of words that has a subject that is actively doing a verb. In the examples above, we find either a noun or a pronoun that is a subject (bold-print and red) attached to a predicate verb (underlined and purple) in each case:

since she laughs at diffident men I despise individuals of low character when the saints go marching in Obediah Simpson is uglier than a rabid racoon because she smiled at him

Phrases vs Clauses
Clauses
.

Phrases 1. Phrases are a group of words

1. Clauses are group of words

2. Clauses have both a subject and a predicate.

3 Clauses can be independent. Independent clauses are full sentences. 4. Clauses can be dependent . Dependant Clauses are not full sentences. Examples: The girl is nice She went very fast We wash the car.

2. Phrases do not have a subject or predicate.

Examples: Excellent idea Great job Wonderful idea

WHAT IS AN IDIOM?

Idioms are words, phrases, or expressions that cannot be taken literally. In other words, when used in everyday language, they have a meaning other than the basic one you would find in the dictionary. Every language has its own idioms.

For example, break a leg is a common idiom.

Literal meaning: I command you to break a bone in your leg and you should probably go to the doctor afterwards to get it fixed. Idiomatic meaning: Do your best and do well. Often, actors tell each other to break a leg before they go out on stage to perform.

An idiom is a multiword construction that is a semantic unit whose meaning cannot be deduced from the meanings of its constituents, and has a non-productive syntactic structure. An idiom is a multiword expression. Individual components of an idiom can often be inflected in the same way individual words in a phrase can be inflected. This inflection usually follows the same pattern of inflection as the idiom's literal counterpart.

Example: have a bee in one's bonnet He has bees in his bonnet

An idiom behaves as a single semantic unit.

It tends to have some measure of internal cohesion such that it can often be replaced by a literal counterpart that is made up of a single word. Example: kick the bucket (die)

It resists interruption by other words whether they are semantically compatible or not. Example: pull one's leg *pull hard on one's leg *pull on one's left leg It resists reordering of its component parts.

Example: let the cat out of the bag *the cat got left out of the bag

An idiom has a non-productive syntactic structure. Only single particular lexemes can collocate in an idiomatic construction. Substituting other words from the same generic lexical relation set will destroy the idiomatic meaning of the expression.

Example: eat one's words *eat one's sentences ?swallow one's words

JOURNAL 5
2 examples of phrases in Malay and English 2 examples of clauses in Malay and English 2 examples of sentences in Malay and English 5 examples of idioms in Malay and their literal and idiomatic meanings 5 example of idioms in English and literal and idiomatic meanings