What is the difference between a sentence and a sentence?

Syntax is a section of linguistics that studies the connection of words in word combinations and word combinations in sentences that form a single text.

The basic units of syntax are phrases and sentences.

It happens that people, especially schoolchildren,take the phrase for a sentence or vice versa. Before we understand the fundamental differences between the two syntactic levels, we will define each of the terms and consider the mechanisms of their functioning inside the text.

Phrase

A phrase is a combination of two or morewords that have a semantic and grammatical connection. The main and dependent word are the main components of the word combination, a certain syntactic connection is established between them:

• management - case-based questions are asked from the main word to the dependent.
• contiguity - a combination of words in meaning, very often with immutable parts of speech: gerund, infinitive. For example, "to put it mildly."
• coordination - the dependent and the main word in the same form.

The relationship of words in the phrase is determined by the case, number and genus.

For example: the phrase "white birch", the main word is birch, the dependent one is white, the type of connection is coordination, in gender (female), number (single), case (B)

More details about the phrases you learn from our article What is the phrase.

Sentence

Many linguists refer the sentence to the basic unit of syntax. The sentence is the highest form of organization of the text.

Signs of the proposal:

• the completeness of thought;
• intonational completeness - at the end a punctuation mark is necessarily put;
• The presence of the grammatical basis - the main members of the sentence - the subject and the predicate;
• The presence of grammatical organization of words within the sentence, thanks to which the sentences are divided into simple and complex;
• has the purpose of saying: narrative, motivational and interrogative;
• the presence of a syntactic connection in the case of complex sentences: compound, complex, unconditioned.

Differences between the sentence and the phrase

Based on the characteristics of the two basic units of syntax, we can draw the following conclusions:

1. A sentence is always a complete thought, unlike a phrase that represents just one fragment of a sentence and is not a relatively complete message.
2. Sentences consist of phrases.
3. Phrases are not the main members of the sentence!
4. The sentence as a whole structural center has a grammatical basis, completeness of thought and a semantic load. The phrase does not possess such characteristics.