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Spoken language, when heard, tends to arrange itself into rhythmic groups of syllables: phrases and the pauses between phrases. These syllabic groups are usually not complete sentences, because most spoken sentences are too long to be easily pronounced without a pause; most sentences, further, are structurally divided into syntactic units, and it is natural for the speaker of a sentence to pause slightly at the points of syntactic division—particularly when these are indicated by marks of punctuation, such as the dash and comma. Further, pauses in the flow of speech are sometimes occasioned by sense-emphasis within a syntactic clause. Thus, though rhythmic groups of syllables are often equivalent to syntactic units, they are not necessarily so... --from Robert Grenier's "Organic Prosody in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams" (This was his senior thesis in 1965 - now available at Project Eclipse.)