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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).
Another feature of the passive is the optional by phrase. The by phrase is where the external argument can be explicitly expressed. This by phrase acts as an adjunct to the verb and is assigned theta roles that would normally be assigned elsewhere in the sentence, specifically it takes the theta role of the active subject.
Mandarin active voice sentences have the same verb phrase structure as English active voice sentences. There is a common active construction in Mandarin called Ba(把) construction: “Ba” is a verb, not a preposition. It is a three-place predicate that subcategorizes for a subject, an object, and a VP complement. [16]
Rather than conjugating directly for voice, English uses the past participle form of the verb plus an auxiliary verb, either be or get (called linking verbs in traditional grammar), to indicate passive voice. The money was donated to the school. The vase got broken during the fight. All men are created equal.
The Anglo-Saxon verb vocabulary consists of short verbs, but its grammar is relatively complex. Syntactic patterns specific to this sub-vocabulary in present-day English include periphrastic constructions for tense, aspect, questioning and negation, and phrasal lexemes functioning as complex predicates, all of which occur also in CDS.
A prop-word: one, as in "the blue one" 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 ...
A complement of a verbum dicendi can be direct or indirect speech. Direct speech is a single unit of linguistic object that is '"mentioned" rather than used.' [1] In contrast, indirect speech is a proposition whose parts make semantic and syntactic contribution to the whole sentence just like parts of the matrix clause (i.e. the main clause/sentence, as opposed to an embedded clause).
The relation between a subject and its predicate is sometimes called a nexus. A predicative nominal is a noun phrase: in the sentence George III is the king of England, the phrase the king of England is the predicative nominal. In English, the subject and predicative nominal must be connected by a linking verb, also called a copula.