clause

a structure containing a (visible or invisible) subject and a predicate.

phrase

a group of words that can undergo syntactic operations (e.g. movement) as a unit.

regular

can be described with the help of a rule, e.g. the regular plural form of nominal expressions is formed by adding the plural morpheme s.

substitution

a) one of the constituency tests to define whether a certain constituent is the same type as another. If a constituent can be substituted by another one it is assumed to be of the same type. E.g. lexical nominal expressions can be substituted by pronoun forms, so they are both assumed to be DPs: The girl I met yesterday/She will visit her family tomorrow.

b) a type of movement where a constituent is moved into an empty position already existing prior to movement, see also adjunction.

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Basic English Syntax with Exercises

2.1.3 Sentences within phrases

From what we have said so far we might think that English expressions are organised with sentences at the top, phrases in the middle and words at the bottom. Unfortunately things are not quite so regular. As we have seen, sentences can appear within sentences. A typical way for this to happen is to have a sentence as part of a phrase which itself is part of the bigger sentence. For example, instead of the phrase pestered the doctor in (12) we might have another phrase:

(17)athe postwoman [pestered the doctor]
bthe postwoman [thinks the doctor is cute]

The fact that we can substitute one phrase for another is an indication that they both are phrases as they both have the same distribution. But note, the new phrase in (17b) contains something that could stand alone as a sentence:

(18)the doctor is cute

Hence we have a phrase which contains a sentence. We can represent this situation easily enough, as in the following structure:

(19)

Of course, this embedded sentence (traditionally called a clause – though some linguists do not use the terms sentence and clause with such a distinction these days) has its own internal structure made up of phrases and words and so the structure can be fully specified as follows:

(20)

As we have mentioned, there is recursion in structure and so as sentences can contain phrases which themselves contain sentences, then these sentences can contain phrases which contain sentences – and so on, indefinitely. We will provide an example here with just one more level of embedding to give you some idea of how it works:

(21)

So far we have looked at sentences which appear inside the second phrase of the main sentence, but this is not the only position we can find an embedded sentence. For example, we can find a sentence as the fist element of another sentence:

(22)a[the doctor] worried the postwoman
b[that she had a sore throat] worried the postwoman

In (22b) we have a sentence she had a sore throat introduced by the complementiser that. This sentence sits in a similar position to the phrase the doctor in (22a), in front of the verb. Thus, instead of this phrase, we can have a sentence, as in the following diagram:

(23)

Furthermore, we can have a sentence inside the first phrase of a sentence:

(24)[the diagnosis that she had the flu] worried the postwoman

Here, the diagnosis that she had the flu, is a phrase which contains the embedded sentence she had the flu, introduced by a complementiser that. The structure looks as follows:

(25)

Of course, this sentence could contain phrases that contain sentences and there could be other phrases elsewhere in the sentence that contain sentences. Hence very complex structures can be produced, though we will not exemplify these here for reasons of space.

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