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A coverb is a word or prefix that resembles a verb or co-operates with a verb. In languages that have the serial verb construction, coverbs are a type of word that shares features of verbs and prepositions. A coverb takes an object or complement and forms a phrase that appears in sequence with another verb phrase in accordance with the serial ...
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 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.
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 .
The subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase. [3] This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are then derived from the configuration.
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)
Structure (not linearized): [ H [S [V O]] ] (where H stands for a head) can be pronounced as H + V S O conventionally. [4] Under the FL approach however, that structure can be pronounced as H + V O S, [4] as the phrase is said to be linearized with the subject to the right of the verb-object constituent. Consequently, we see a VOS order.
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 .