Absolute Predicative Word Groups

1) Nominative (isolated) absolute constructions. e.g. Her mother remaining in bed, Dinny dined alone with her aunt.

2) Prepositional absolute constructions (with,without) e.g. I simply couldn’t sit with Hubert on my mind.

Syntactical Relations between the Components of Phrase

They may be divided into 3 groups: 1) agreement; 2) government; 3) adjoinment. Agreement is a means of syntactical relationship between words which implies that the use of one form necessitates the use of the other.

1) an adjunct word agrees in number with its headword (a noun) E.g. this (that) book – these (those) books.

2) a singular subject requires a predicate in the singular, a plural subject requires the predicate in the plural. E.g. I am a student. There are 2 books on the table. But in modern english there is sometimes a conflict between form and meaning, in these cases the predicate doesn’t agree with the subject. My family are early risers. My family is small.

Government is a means of connecting words consisting in the use of a certain case form of the adjunct required by its headword.

The use of the objective case of personal pronouns and of the pronoun ‘who’ when they are subordinate to a verb or follow a preposition: e.g. I saw him (her, them). Whom did u see there?

We also find government between the head-nouns and the attributive adjunct noun. E.g. The boy’s mother; the student’s answer.

Adjoinment is such a way of connecting words when they are joined to one another without any specail forms by only their position and combinability. It is found in the following cases:

Adverbs are joined to the verb. E.g. they walked slowly.

Adjectives, participles, pronouns (when used as attributes) are joined to their head-nouns. E.g. a small room.

Adverbs are joined to adjectives or other adverbs: very interesting, very well.

The Theory of Phrase

The theory of phrase or word combination in linguistics has a long tradition going back to the 18-th century. According to Russian scholars the term ‘word combination’ (словосочетание) can be applied only to such groups of words which contain at least two notional words forming a grammatical unit. Thus Soviet linguists restrict the use of the term ‘word combination’ to combination of notional words. Western scholars hold a different view of the problem. They consider that every combination of two or more words constitutes a unit which they term ‘phrase’. In other words, western linguists do not limit the term ‘phrase’ to combination of notional words and do not draw a sharp distinction between the two types of word-groups such as ‘wise men’ and ‘to the lighthouse’. The first and the most important difference of opinion on the question between soviet and western scholarsconcerns the constituents of the word groups forming grammatical units.

Another debatable problem in soviet linguistics was whether a predicative combination of words forms a word combination.

It is generally known that a sentence is based on predication and its purpose in communication. A word combination has no such aim. Word combinations are more like words because they are employed for naming things, actions, qualities and so on. In contrast with soviet linguists some western scholars make no difference between subject – predicate combinations of words and other word combinations, though some western theories bear considerable resemblance to Russian ideas.

There’s no traditional terminology in the works of English and American scholars discussing combinations of words; and different terms are used to express the same idea (phrase, combination of words, cluster of words, word group).