In this video I'd like to review all the
different kinds of phrases that we have
in the English language. The only one
we're not going to talk about is the
absolute phrase, because it's really
tricky, and in any case it's fairly rare,
so we'll cover that in a different video.
The first sentence contains some fairly
common kinds of phrases. We start with
"My grumpy aunt," and we call this a noun
phrase...
What makes it a noun phrase is [that] at the
core we have this noun here, "aunt," and then
the noun has a bunch of modifiers -- so "my"
and "grumpy" are essentially adjectives
that are modifying "aunt," although "my"
can also be considered a pronoun. So we
start with a noun phrase, and then the
next phrase here is going to be a verb
phrase, so we have a verb phrase next.
There's our verb phrase, and the verb
phrase includes a bunch of helping verbs
here and a present participle. So all of
this together is going to be our verb
phrase. The present participle we'll get
to in a moment because it can also be
considered its own phrase in some ways
so we'll talk about that in a second
here. Alright, then after the verb phrase
we have another noun phrase. Again,
we have a noun with a bunch of modifiers,
so we have the article "a, "we have "ugly" --
another adjective -- and "really" here is an
adverb that just modifies "ugly." So ugly
to what extent? Really ugly! And all of
this together then is another noun
phrase. We end the sentence with a
prepositional phrase. This is a
prepositional phrase, and all you need
for a prepositional phrase is ... a
preposition and then an object of the
preposition, which is going to be a noun
or pronoun along with its modifiers. Well,
then we get to our second sentence here:
"Finally finished straightening all the
pictures, Catherine trembled at the
thought of an earthquake." Here we're
going to start with what's called a
participial phrase, so a participial
phrase, and there are two kinds of
participles
to watch out for. There are present
participles, and they're easy to spot
because they always end in -ing and then
we also have past participles, and they're
a specific part of the verb. If you
say for instance, "I see, I saw, I have seen"
then "seen" would be the past participle.
In this case the past participle is
"finished" and we have a little adverb
here as well in "finally." That's just
telling us a little bit about when we
finished. Adverbs then can also modify
participles. That's our first participial
phrase, then we have another one here, and
it starts with a present participle, and
notice that telltale -ing ending. So
"straightening" is a present participle,
and we can also consider this a
participial phrase. After that we get to
a couple of main parts of the sentence,
so we have a subject in "Catherine," and we
have a verb in "trembled." We could
consider this a verb phrase if we wanted
to, but most of the time I would say if
you don't have more words (if you don't
have helping verbs and so on) then we can
just talk about it as a regular verb. We
end the sentence with a couple of
prepositional phrases, so we have "at the
thought" and we have "of an earthquake."
Each of these starts with a
preposition, and each one ends with, in
this case, a noun that's the object of
the preposition. As you can see, some of
these phrases are more essential than
others and often phrases can be put in
between brackets that show that they're
not really part of the core of the
sentence. Then we get to the next
sentence here: "Swimming lanes makes me
hungry." And this one also starts with a
present participle. But here's the deal:
if you use the present participle as a
noun (so if it functions like a noun) then
we call it a gerund. And a
gerund phrase is basically the whole
phrase that includes that present
participle acting
like a noun. Often the gerund can be the
subject, it can be the direct object, so
that phrase has a bunch of different
roles it can play in the sentence. And
you can see that the rest of the
sentence is fairly straightforward here,
so we have a verb, we have a direct
object, and so on. Okay, let's move on to
the fourth one, and in this case we have
a couple of infinitives. If you recall,
an infinitive is a version of the verb
where we have "to" plus the verb.
And you can say "to love," "to
shoot," "to run," and so on. So we can call
this an infinitive phrase if we like. We
can also add extra modifiers, of course,
so you could say "to love greatly (for
instance) is to hurt much." Let's just add
a little bit of extra stuff here ...
and then we have two phrases that are
both infinitive phrases. They have
different functions in this sentence. We
have this linking verb that connects
them, so we have a subject in "to love" and
then "to hurt" is acting like a noun here.
It's the subject complement that
describes the subject over here. Alright,
you don't have to remember always
what these phrases do. It's more a case of
just being able to recognize the
different kinds of phrases. We're going
to cover one more phrase here finally,
and this is called an appositive phrase,
which sounds really fancy but it's not
too difficult. An appositive is a phrase
that comes after a noun or pronoun. So
there's our noun or sometimes a pronoun
as well, and then we use this phrase to
rename the previous noun or pronoun. Most
of the time when we have an appositive we use a
noun phrase to do this. So this is a noun
phrase here ("the class clown"), but
it's acting like an appositive, just to give a
bit more information about our previous
noun. You can also use other kinds of
phrases as well instead of a noun phrase,
but
we're just going to stick with this for
now because it's the most common. That's
it then for phrases. Quite a few to kind
of take stock of, but over time if you do
some exercises I think you'll get the
hang of it. And in any case some of these
are much more common than others.