Until the early twentieth century, people who wrote grammar books tended to use terms like "phrase" and "clause" rather unsystematically -- they were descriptive labels, but not precisely defined ones. The way the terms are used in U.S. K-12 education is the result of a consensus that developed among educators on this side of the Atlantic, but it's not a universal consensus. A good many Commonwealth grammarians (for example, many in the Systemics approach, but certainly not limited to it), use "group" for what most Statesiders would call a phrase (basically, any phrase that all of us would view as endocentric is a "group," but an arguably-exocentric constituent without a predicate is a "phrase," with the prepositional phrase being the prime example). Similarly, the requirement that a clause have a subject and finite verb is part of the consensus that developed here, but not elsewhere. I like to view gerunds, infinitives, etc. as kinds of *predicates* -- but that's based on an approach in which the clause has three, rather than two, major constituents: subject, finite marker, and predicate. I derived that from SFL, but there are analogues in other modern approaches and there are certainly historical precedents for that tripartite division. It's not part of the K-12 consensus, though, such that it is, so I don't harp on it much in my pedagogic grammar classes. Bill Spruiell Dept. of English Central Michigan University To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/