In this video I'd really like to talk to
you about the difference between phrases
and clauses, and I guess we could also
add to that parts of speech. If we think
about the the difference between these
very generally, and we'll get to this
picture in a moment here ... but if we think
about them generally, we can think that a
part of speech is the smallest unit, and
then a phrase consists of one or more
parts of speech that together kind of
form a unit, and then a clause is the
biggest unit and consists of quite a few
phrases. So that's one way to think about
the relationship between these three
parts of the sentence. It's a bit
like building with Lego. If you add
enough pieces together, eventually you'll get
something pretty interesting. Now, if we
look at our picture here, imagine that
you're going skiing, and which of these
items, these skiing items, is
absolutely essential? Which one would you
not be able to ski without? I think you
would probably agree with me that the
skis are the most essential. Obviously
without a jacket and a toque, as
Canadians say ... there's our toque
(or a hat or beanie) ... without a
toque and a sweater or coat you would
freeze, but at least you get a little
ways with your skis, whereas without them
you wouldn't get very far at all! In a
sentence it's the same thing. So, your skis
in a sentence are the subject and the
verb. You always need at least a subject
and a verb, and that also allows us then
to distinguish between clauses and
phrases. If we make a little list here,
a clause has at least one
subject and one verb (so one subject plus
one verb as the absolute minimum). We also
know that clauses can be separated into
dependent and independent clauses, and
dependent ones
cannot stand by themselves as a
sentence. Independent ones can be a
sentence by themselves. So we know that
clauses are these bigger units then, and
we need a few things in order to have a
clause. We can, however, include
a bit else as well. So all of this
together is really one clause, and that's
because we also include the phrases.
And then
if we want to add to that we can add
another clause with more phrases, another
subject and verb, and so on. What is a
phrase then by comparison? Well, a phrase
is a smaller group of words, so a smaller
group of words, and these words are often
not essential,
though sometimes, you know, some of these
words are. For instance, if you have a
verb phrase, then obviously it's
essential because you can't have a
sentence without a verb. They also act as
parts of speech.
And let me give you an example
then of a couple of these things that
we've talked about. If you look at the
the last part of the sentence, we have
two prepositional phrases. We have "on the
slopes" and we have "near Whistler." These
are both prepositional phrases. They
start with a preposition and they end
with an object of the preposition, which
is a noun in each case. So we have two
prepositional phrases, and they're not
essential. We can put them in brackets
and the sentence would still be a
sentence. You could say "Early in the
morning, we skied." They're also acting
like a part of speech. In this case, if we
say "we skied where?" You could say "on the
slopes" -- so this prepositional phrase is
acting like an adverb. It tells you
about the verb. The other one is
acting the same way. It's answering the
question "where did we ski?"
So both of these are acting like adverbs,
and that's why we can say that these
phrases often act as a part of speech.
The last thing then to mention
about phrases is that every sentence
contains multiple phrases.
[There are] any number of phrases in every sentence,
and you probably guessed that already. Now
we've mentioned just one or two
phrases here, so we've mentioned
prepositional phrases, but there are lots
of other phrases, and in fact this verb
here, we could call it a phrase if we
wanted to, although it's easy enough just
to call it a verb, but if we wanted to add
to this, if we wanted to have a lengthier
kind of verb phrase, we could say "we went
skiing" or "we will
be going skiing."
Now we're really piling up [on]
the verbs. All of this together then
would be a verb phrase, and you can see
that our verb phrase is essential in
this case because it's really part
of the core of the clause. Just to recap
very quickly, phrases consist of
parts of speech. They're smaller than
clauses. They're smaller groups of words.
They're often not essential. They act as
a part of speech, and it can be hard to
tell sometimes which one, but we'll talk
about that in a different video some
more. And every sentence contains
multiple phrases, so in future videos
then we'll really talk about all the
different types of phrases, but this
video is more of a concept video and
hopefully you get the idea.