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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.
In the most typical cases, the predicand corresponds to the subject of a clause, and the predicate corresponds to a verb phrase (VP) that is the head of the clause. But there are also form-meaning mismatches, where the predicand is not a subject or where the predicate is not the head of the clause. Also, not every utterance has a predicand.
Predicates may also be collective or distributive. Collective predicates require their subjects to be somehow plural, while distributive ones do not. An example of a collective predicate is "formed a line". This predicate can only stand in a nexus with a plural subject: The students formed a line. — Collective predicate appears with plural ...
Inverse copular constructions challenge one of the major dogmas of the theory of clause or sentence structure, i.e. that the two basic constituents of a sentence - the noun phrase (NP) and the verb phrase (VP) - are associated with the logical/grammatical functions of subject and predicate (cf. phrase structure rules and sentence). In fact ...
However, there are some restrictions on NP VP constructions. The verb in example (59) is infinitival, without inflected tense, and takes a PP complement. However, the following example (d) is an NP VP small clause construction that is ungrammatical. Although the verb here is infinitival, it cannot grammatically take an AP complement.
If there is a difference between these concepts, it resides with the status of the subject argument. Traditionally, predicates are interpreted as NOT subcategorizing for their subject argument because the subject argument appears outside of the minimal VP containing the predicate. [12] Predicates do, however, c-select their subject arguments, e.g.
Huang and Liu (2014) argued that Bei construction is not a special construction that involves the passivization of intransitive verbs. They believe that what is passivized isn't the VP itself (in Bei-VP construction), but actually a null light verb with a causative, putative or activity predicate that takes VP as its complement or adjunct.
The phrase structure relation derives from an initial binary division, whereby the clause is split into a subject noun phrase (NP) and a predicate verb phrase (VP). This division is certainly present in the basic analysis of the clause that we find in the works of, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky .