Eggcorn Forum

Phase means different things to different grammarians in different theoretical contexts. I can’t think of any of them that is particularly helpful here.

I don’t doubt that it’s a malapropism in some proportion of the cases (probably, as you note, a typo in many others.) PSG (as it’s often enough designated) was a notion from Transformational Grammar 50 years ago, and is a kind of patterns that you can implement on computers, use in experiments with monkeys and get crispish results (lots of nice binarity in there), and so on. A lot of those who use it as a tool don’t think of phrases particularly: it is a clichéd name, and the salience of the parts has diminished considerably for many users, I am sure. Many grad students for whom English is not the first language probably use the phrase “phrase structure grammar” more often than the word “phrase”. So it is ripe for malapropization or eggcorning. And “Phase Structure Grammar” sounds quite appropriately techy and scientifistic.

I don’t know what it would mean, though. The designated kind of theoretical grammars doesn’t have anything salient to do with phases, that I know of.

So, my guess is that this is quite certainly (a) a typo in some occurrences, very probably (b) a malaprop in some occurrences, quite possibly© a standard malaprop for some users who don’t realize it should be “phrase structure”. But, until someone explains what phases have to do with it, or even better, explains how they had analyzed it in the days of their ignorance so that the phase made sense, I don’t see it as an eggcorn.