construction, grammatical construction, expression

a group of words that form a constituent of a sentence and are considered as a single unit; "I concluded from his awkward constructions that he was a foreigner"

• adjunct — a construction that is part of a sentence but not essential to its meaning and can be omitted without making the sentence ungrammatical
• clause — (grammar) an expression including a subject and predicate but not constituting a complete sentence
• complement — a word or phrase used to complete a grammatical construction
• involution — a long and intricate and complicated grammatical construction
• phrase — an expression forming a grammatical constituent of a sentence but not containing a finite verb
• predicator — an expression that predicates

• constituent, grammatical constituent — (grammar) a word or phrase or clause forming part of a larger grammatical construction