Can you give me an example what a phrase is?

Answer 1

A phrase is a group of words, usually successive words, in a sentence that together fill a grammatical or part of speech function that could in principle be substituted by a single word, but do not constitute a clause, which must have a subject and an active verb form, as contrasted to a verbal.

The most common phrases are probably prepositional phrases, which contain a preposition and the object of that preposition, and may contain additional modifiers. Consider the following simple sentence: "She left quickly." Without changing the meaning of the sentence, the adverb "quickly" could be replaced by an adverbial prepositional phrase, "in a hurry", where "in" is the preposition, "hurry" is the object of the preposition, and "a" is an article modifying "hurry".

Other common phrases are:

- proper names with more than one word, such as "John Quincy Adams" or "Pope John Paul II" where the phrase denotes a single person and the words together function as a single noun in a sentence;

- verbal (participial, gerundive, or infinitive) phrases, such as "Having been away for many years, I did not recognize my home town", in which all the words "Having been away for many years" together constitute a participial phrase that functions as an adjective modifying "I" (note also the internal prepositional phrase, "for many years", which is part of the participial phrase as well as constituting a separate phrase itself); and

- compound verbs such as "shall be going" in the sentence "I shall be going tomorrow."

Answer 2

Sure! "A piece of cake" is an example of a phrase. It is a group of words that function together to convey a specific meaning. In this case, the phrase means that something is very easy.