How Yii Generates Dom

Dear friends,
I'm experiencing a behaviour of Yii that illustrates that I must be missing something.
To be short: this is the code in view/layouts/main.php:

<div class="large-3 columns">
 <?php  
  $this->renderPartial("/categories/_small");
  echo "some test text";
 ?>
</div>
<footer>This is a footer</footer>

Strange enough, but the generated html

<div class="large-3 columns">
   <ul id="yw0">... text from render partial goes here ... </ul>
  <div style="clear:both;"> some test text </div> <---- WHERE THIS DIV TAG COMES FROM?!
  <footer> This is a footer </footer> <---- WHY IS IT NESTED INSIDE THE DIV?
</div>

is quite different from what I was expecting:

<div class="large-3 columns">
   text from render partial goes here 
   some test text <--- WITHOUT ANY ADDITIONAL DIV TAG
</div>
<footer> This is a footer </footer> <---- NOT NESTED INSIDE DIV TAG

Could anybody shed ligth on what's wrong here and how to generate desired html?