The word ‘phrase’ is often used loosely to mean any group of words that form a unit. In grammar, it means a word or group of words that has a single function within a clause or another phrase.
Take the sentence The boy patted the dog. Although there are five words, there are three distinct parts – the boy, patted, and the dog. So the boy is a phrase, in this case a ‘noun phrase’ acting as the subject; patted is the verb; and the dog is another noun phrase, here the object of the verb.
Now take a sentence that is clearly ambiguous: She attacked the man with the knife. The pronoun she is the subject phrase, and attacked is the verb. But what about the rest?
There are two ways of analyzing the sentence. In one (where the man has the knife), the man with the knife is one constituent part – a noun phrase, acting as the object of attacked. It can be broken down further into a noun phrase the man, plus a subordinate prepositional phrase with the knife.
In the other meaning (where she uses a knife when attacking the man), the full object is now simply the man. You could reword the sentence as With a knife she attacked the man or She attacked the man viciously. The phase with the knife is therefore an adverbial phase – it acts like an adverb.
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