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Words, phrases, clauses, and sentences constitute what is called the GRAMMATICAL HIERARCHY. We can represent this schematically as follows:
sentences
consist of one or more...
clauses
consist of one or more...
phrases
consist of one or more...
words
Sentences are at the top of the hierarchy, so they are the largest unit which we will be considering (though some grammars do look beyond the sentence). At the other end of the hierarchy, words are at the lowest level, though again, some grammars go below the word to consider morphology, the study of how words are constructed.
At the clause level and at the phrase level, two points should be noted:
1. Although clauses are higher than phrases in the hierarchy, clauses can occur within phrases:
The man who lives beside us is ill
Here we have a relative clause who lives beside us within the NP the man who lives beside us.
2. Clauses can occur within clauses, and phrases can occur within phrases.
Bearing these two points in mind, we can now illustrate the grammatical hierarchy using the following sentence:
My brother won the lottery
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Click here to see the grammatical hierarchy in this sentence')
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This is a simple sentence (S), consisting of a matrix clause (MC):
[S/MC My brother won the lottery]
We can subdivide the clause into an NP and a VP:
[S/MC [NP My brother] [VP won the lottery]]
The VP contains a further NP within it:
[S/MC [NP My brother] [VP won [NP the lottery]]]
So we have a total of three phrases. Each phrase consists of individual words:
[S/MC [NP [Det My] [N brother]] [VP [V won] [NP [Det the] [N lottery]]]]
Each of the bracketed units here is a word, a phrase, or a clause. We refer to these as CONSTITUENTS. A constituent is defined as a word or a group of words which acts syntactically as a unit.