David Kārena-Holmes is a published author, living in Dunedin

OPINION: The past three columns have been concerned with broader issues involved in language acquisition.

Perhaps it’s time then, particularly for those readers wishing to persist in getting a better understanding of te reo Māori, for brief revision of some major principles underlying the construction of phrases and sentences.

This is material which has been presented previously – but there are always, it seems, better perspectives and further insights to be gained with each fresh approach.

The main principle, as Bruce Biggs emphasised in his landmark Let’s Learn Māori, is that the focus in learning should be on the phrase rather than the single word as the unit of Māori speech.

But what is a “phrase”? Seeking a definition of the word “phrase” can be confusing, with many seemingly contradictory definitions on offer.

Among the best is probably that in Wikipedia where a phrase is defined as “a group of words or a single word acting as a grammatical unit.”

Focusing solely on te reo Māori, it can be said that main weight of a phrase resides in a “head-word” – usually a noun, such as whare (“house”) or a verb, such as haere (“to move” – “to go” or “to come” according to context).

Nouns and verbs are regarded as having what is described as “real meaning”, in contrast to the 55 or so “particles” which, rather than meaning, have structural functions in forming phrases.

A head-word may stand on its own as a single-word phrase, as in Haere! (“Go!”) or it may be preceded and/or followed by one or more particles: Haere atu. (“Go away.”); Haere mai. (“Come hither.”)

Haere atu / ki te whare ra. (“Go over to the house yonder.”) is thus a sentence of two phrases (in these columns breaks between phrases are indicated by a forward slash).

Usually no more than two particles precede the head-word, but several (up to five in some cases) may follow the base-word nucleus of the phrase.

The expression “base-word nucleus” is used here because the head-word may be accompanied by one or more other base words: Haere atu / ki te whare whero ra. (“Go to the red house yonder.”)

In some cases, the head-word may not be a noun or verb but a word standing in place of base word: He whare ātaahua / tēnei. (“A house beautiful / this.” = “This is a beautiful house.”). The word tēnei is formed from the particle te (“the”) and the position particle nei (“here”).

In attempting to follow longer passages of Māori it may be found useful to look for where the phrase-breaks occur.