2 Gramatical units

A FLIGHT ANNOUNCEMENT

'Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of British Island Airways, Captain Massey and his crew welcome you on board the start Herald Flight to Southampton. Our fight time will be approximately forty-five minutes, and we shall be climbing to an altiude of eight thousand feet and cruising at a speed of two hundred and fifty miles per hour.'
(from M. Underwood and P. Barr Listeners)

The grammatical unit of English are words, phrase, clauses and sentences.

1 Words
The words in the announcement are good, eveing, ladies, and gentlemen, on etc.
NOTE For word-building, e.g. air + ways = airways, > 282

2 Phrase and clauses
We use phrases to build a clause. Here is an example.
___________________________________________________________________________
Subject                        Verb                       Complement
(noun phrase)              (verb phrasse)       (noun phrase)
___________________________________________________________________________
Our flight time              will be                     approxiamately forty-five minutes.
___________________________________________________________________________

Here the noun phrase our flight time is the subject of the clause. A clause has a
subject and a verb. there are can be other phrases, too. In this next example we use a
prepositional phrase as an adverbial.
___________________________________________________________________________
Adverbial                         Subject                Verb                 Object              Object
(prepositional phrase)    (noun phrase)     (verb phrasse)   (noun phrase)   (noun phrase)
___________________________________________________________________________
On behalf of the airline    we                        wish                  you                 a pleasant flight.
___________________________________________________________________________

For more about the difference kinds of phrases, > 4.
For subject, object, complement and adverbial, > 5.
For finite and non-finite clauses, > 239(3).

3 Sentences
A sentence can be a single clause.
     On behalf of British Island Airways, Captain Massey and his crew welcome you on
     board the Start Herald flight to Southampton.
A written sentence begins with a capital letter (On) and ends with a mark such as a
full stop.

We can also combine two or more clause in one sentence. For example, We can
use and to link the clauses.
     Our fight time will be approximately forty-five minutes, and we shall be climbing