School and learning

This is the list a course needs in its first hour, because it holds the words a grammar explanation is made of: le verbe, le mot, l’exemple, le sens. One of them means the opposite of what it looks like. La phrase is the whole sentence, subject and verb and full stop — écris la phrase entière asks for all of it. The English word « phrase » is defined by being less than a sentence: a group of words with no verb of its own, a fragment. So the two words sit on opposite sides of the same boundary, and a reader who carries the English sense across will understand every instruction in a French grammar book as asking for a smaller piece of language than it does. The word for the English sense is le groupe de mots, or le syntagme in a linguistics book. And une phrase toute faite is a set expression, which is closer to the English word again — but only by accident.