terminology - Longer than a word — smaller than a sentence

What would you call a linguistic construct that is just big enough to convey a meaning within a context, longer than a word but not having the length and proper form of a complete sentence? Like, for example, "good job" or "nice shirt" — neither of those is a full sentence but both get the point across. A sentencette, or is there a formal term for it?

Answer

The basic grammatical units are morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence. In the definition given in the ‘Longman Student Grammar of Spoken English’, a phrase is ‘a structural unit built from words, consisting of a head plus (optionally) modifiers.’ In 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language', David Crystal puts it a little differently: 'A cluster of words smaller than a clause, forming a grammatical unit.' (He mentions that it is sometimes called a 'group'. This is the term used in functional grammar.) To take an example, the sentence ‘Egyptians have approved a controversial new constitution’ contains two phrases: ‘Egyptians’ and ‘a controversial new constitution’.

This is the generally understood use of phrase. It is not to be confused with its use in the approach to grammar known as ‘immediate constituent analysis’. There, phrase is used rather differently, in that a sentence is divided into a Noun Phrase and a Verb Phrase, and each of those is further divided into all the constituent parts of the sentence.