This week: phrasing! Then, a relevant quote, some footnotes, and a little bit of trivia to get us out. Let’s get to it.
“Phrasing!” Fans of the 2009 animated adventure comedy Archer will immediately recognize this particular bit of dialogue as the titular character’s response to any and every possible double entendre he stumbles across. Lana makes a reference to something being hard? Phrasing! Ray mentions that there’s a happy ending? Phrasing! Even Archer’s archenemy, Barry, who says he’s coming for Archer…you know where this is going, right? Phrasing!*
It is, as running gags go, a surprisingly good one that the show not only gets a lot of milage out of but one that they actually manage to use as an indication of character growth through the evolution of and reactions to the catchphrase as the show progresses. But, it does beg the question: What’s a phrase? Is it a word? A clause? A sentence? The answer to all three questions is: yes, sometimes.
A phrase, as we normally think of it, is, ahem, “a word or group of words forming a syntactic constituent with a single grammatical function.” In less stuffy terms, a phrase is a couple of words that work well together to create meaning. And it, like word, is something that we use, intuitively as speakers of a language, in everyday idioms like catchphrase, turn of phrase, to coin a phrase, and, well, phrasing.
So let’s start with the dictionary, which lists five separate definitions for phrase as a noun, beginning with the one quoted above and going on to include:
a characteristic manner or style of expression
a brief expression
a short musical thought typically two to four measures long closing with a cadence
a series of dance movements comprising a section of a pattern
It’s interesting but not surprising that these varying definitions all take a larger piece of a whole, but not the most basic component. A linguistic phrase is somewhere between a word and a sentence, a musical phrase occupies the middle ground between a chord and a song, and a choreographic phrase is in the liminal space between a pose and a ballet. Based on that, it would be reasonable to assume that the etymological history of phrase means “between.” However (and you knew that was coming) phrase actually traces back to the Greek word phrazein meaning "to point out" or "explain." So. Our two most basic building blocks of an English sentence, a word and a phrase, both stem from words that mean to talk and in doing so, explain. The more things change, I guess?
Armed with definitions and history, our next step is to look at synonyms. Here are some of the words thesaurus.com lists as being most synonymous with phrase: expression, idiom, motto, remark, saying, slogan, and utterance. And, unsurprisingly, most of those words boil down to ways of saying word. So it might help to bring in a few descriptive adjectives.
To start, let's look at "grammatical phrase." The most apt synonym is "clause," which we know as a partial sentence, often one that helps define either the subject or the object of the sentence. Moving on from there, we have "conversational phrase," which we can synonymize (is that a word or did I just make it up?) with a few different words like "expression," "saying," or the example from Merriam-Webster, “catchphrase.”**
One last way of looking at phrases comes from something called phrasal verbs***, which are basically when we use two (or more) words to describe an action. Things like blow up and write down are phrasal verbs. The reason we call these verbs phrasal verbs is because they are usually either a sentence by themselves, “shut up” or “chill out,"or because they are part of a larger sentence with a distinct meaning all on their own. But phrasal verbs are especially notable in English in that they are almost always idiomatic. To take the example of “chill out,” without having some prior knowledge or several context clues, it could be nearly impossible for a non-native speaker to understand. And so again, we have phrases as small chunks of meaning that are self-contained, somewhere between the single idea contained in a word and the layers of nuance and complexity inherent in a sentence. Which is a pretty good definition of phrase, come to think of it.
But how about all those idioms mentioned back in the introduction? We’ll get to them next week. Stay tuned.
Footnotes
Phrase compared to its synonyms leads to a whole warren of rabbit holes: are a catchphrase and a slogan the same thing? How about catchphrase and punchline? Or what about a stock phrase and an expression? A lot of them seem to be very dependent on who you ask and what their relationship to one or more of these words is.
But what about our other definitions of phrase, the ones that referred to dance and music? This is a whole rabbit hole unto itself and one I didn’t really have the space to get into here. But the gist of it is that phrasing in dance is closely tied to musical phrases as the latter often dictates the former. Checking the thesaurus for musical phrase gives us passage, strain, chorus, and refrain among several others. What’s interesting (thesis alert!) is that many of these synonyms show marks of evolution (passage of time, new strain of virus) while the synonyms for grammatical phrase denote self-contained chunks of meaning.
Look, I know having a favorite piece of grammar makes me a huge nerd, but what did you really expect from a linguistics and language newsletter? Phrasal verbs are cool and they make English cool and that is the hill I choose to die on.
Trivially Yours
Many commonly used musical phrases come in simple time signatures like 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4. One of the most well-known odd time signature pop songs is Pink Floyd’s Money, which uses 7/4. What this means in terms of musical phrasing is up for debate. Like seriously stoned debate for weeks on end by bored college kids debate. Consider yourself warned.
Stay curious,
J