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In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause.Thus, in the sentence A fat man quickly put the money into the box, the words quickly put the money into the box constitute a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its arguments, but not the subject a fat man.
The phrases do so and do what for questions are pro-verb forms in English. They can be used as substitutes for verbs in x-bar theory grammar to test verb phrase completeness. Bare infinitives forms often are used in place of the missing pro-verb forms. Examples from Santorini and Kroch: [5]
The resulting two-word verbs are single semantic units, so grow up and give in are listed as discrete entries in modern dictionaries. These verbs can be transitive or intransitive. If they are transitive, i.e. if they have an object, the particle may come either before or after the object of the verb. c. She handed in her homework. d.
Here the verb phrase (understood from the context) is reduced to a single auxiliary or other "special" verb, negated if appropriate. If there is no special verb in the original verb phrase, it is replaced by do/does/did: he does, they didn't. Clauses that omit the verb, in particular those like me too, nor me, me neither. The latter forms are ...
Many English verbs are used together with a particle (such as in or away) and with preposition phrases in constructions that are commonly referred to as "phrasal verbs". These complements often modify the meaning of the verb in an unpredictable way, and a verb-particle combination such as give up can be considered a single lexical item.
Another type is the inflectional phrase, where (for example) a finite verb phrase is taken to be the complement of a functional, possibly covert head (denoted INFL) which is supposed to encode the requirements for the verb to inflect – for agreement with its subject (which is the specifier of INFL), for tense and aspect, etc.
Being a verb, an infinitive may take objects and other complements and modifiers to form a verb phrase (called an infinitive phrase). Like other non-finite verb forms (like participles, converbs, gerunds and gerundives), infinitives do not generally have an expressed subject; thus an infinitive verb phrase also constitutes a complete non-finite ...
Therefore, in a verb phrase, the head is always a verb. [5] Again, nominal sentences like ʾanā saʿīd do not have a verb, so the verb head position in the verb phrase cannot be filled. Having a zero copula is one way to solve the problems listed above without compromising the existing syntactic theory.