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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.
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).
A sentence may also be broken down by functional parts: subject, object, adverbial, verb (predicator). [6] The subject is the owner of an action, the verb represents the action, the object represents the recipient of the action, and the adverbial qualifies the action. The various parts can be phrases rather than individual words.
A pro-adjective substitutes an adjective or a phrase that functions as an adjective: so as in "It is less so than we had expected." A pro-adverb substitutes an adverb or a phrase that functions as an adverb: how or this way. A pro-verb substitutes a verb or a verb phrase: do, as in: "I will go to the party if you do".
The predicate is a verb phrase that consists of more than one word. In the backyard, the dog barked and howled at the cat. This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, dog, and one predicate, barked and howled at the cat. This predicate has two verbs, known as a compound predicate: barked and howled. (This should ...
A generative parse tree: the sentence is divided into a noun phrase (subject), and a verb phrase which includes the object. This is in contrast to structural and functional grammar which consider the subject and object as equal constituents. [9] [10]
The following phrases show the phrase heads in bold. Examples of left-branching phrases (= head-final phrases): the house - Noun phrase (NP) very happy - Adjective phrase (AP) too slowly - Adverb phrase (AdvP) Examples of right-branching phrases (= head-initial phrases): laugh loudly - Verb phrase (VP) with luck - Prepositional phrase (PP)
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.