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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.
Adjective phrase (AP), adverb phrase (AdvP), adposition phrase (PP), noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP), etc. In terms of phrase structure rules , phrasal categories can occur to the left of the arrow while lexical categories cannot, e.g. NP → D N. Traditionally, a phrasal category should consist of two or more words, although conventions ...
A grammar that uses phrase structure rules is a type of phrase structure grammar. Phrase structure rules as they are commonly employed operate according to the constituency relation, and a grammar that employs phrase structure rules is therefore a constituency grammar ; as such, it stands in contrast to dependency grammars , which are based on ...
A verb together with its dependents, excluding its subject, may be identified as a verb phrase (although this concept is not acknowledged in all theories of grammar [23]). A verb phrase headed by a finite verb may also be called a predicate. The dependents may be objects, complements, and modifiers (adverbs or adverbial phrases).
Taken together, such examples seem to motivate a structure for the test sentence that has a left-branching verb phrase, because only a left-branching verb phrase can view each of the indicated strings as a constituent. There is a problem with this sort of reasoning, however, as the next example illustrates: (f) We did so in the pub.
A transitive verb like “make”, for example, was assigned the feature [+--NP] meaning that “make” can (+) appear before (--) a noun phrase (NP). [3] Verbs that take just one argument are classified as intransitive, while verbs with two and three arguments are classified as transitive and ditransitive, respectively. [4]