Clause vs Phrase

The grammatical terms clause and phrase are often confused by English speakers. This lesson filled with clauses and phrases will help you understand the difference.



Clause
A clause is a group of words including a subject and a predicate. The subject is the person or thing performing the action of the verb in the predicate, while the predicate is that verb plus, optionally, additional information such as the object of the verb or an adjective describing the subject.

Birds fly.
He looks happy.
We love pancakes!
I might be crazy.

The above examples are all independent clauses, because they are stand-alone sentences. A sentence can have more than one independent clause – shown here in italics.

Birds fly and fish swim.
He looks happy but you seem sad.

A clause that depends on another clause to complete its meaning is called a dependent clause or subordinate clause. Dependent clauses cannot stand alone; their meaning is dependent upon  an accompanying independent clause. In these examples, the dependent clauses are in italics. As you can see, if you remove the non-italicized words, the sentence is incomplete.

I don’t know how birds fly.
Tell me if he looks happy.
We’re going to IHOP because we love pancakes!
He thinks (that) I might be crazy.

In English, unlike French and Spanish, the conjunction "that" is optional, which can make it more difficult to recognize dependent clauses.

Phrase
A phrase is any group of words that form a unit of meaning within a sentence. There are different types of phrases depending on what part of speech the most important word – called the headword – belongs to.
Noun phrases include a noun plus a determiner and/or an adjective:

the house
any big store
green trees
some yellow cars

Prepositional phrases consist of a preposition plus the object of that preposition.

inside the store
at home
behind closed doors
on top of a mountain

Adjectival phrases are made up of an adjective plus an adverb and/or a prepositional phrase.

slightly dizzy
perfectly normal
covered in dust
very happy about it