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In linguistics a lexical verb or main verb is a member of an open class of verbs that includes all verbs except auxiliary verbs. Lexical verbs typically express action, state, or other predicate meaning. In contrast, auxiliary verbs express grammatical meaning. The verb phrase of a sentence is generally headed by a lexical verb. [1] Lexical ...
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002) describes auxiliary verbs as "a small list of verbs with very specific syntactic properties", differing from "all the rest of the verbs in the dictionary, which we will call the lexical verbs . . . in inflectional morphology as well as syntax" [9]: 74 And later: "A general definition of ...
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
These features separate English interjections from the language's other lexical categories, such as nouns and verbs. Though English interjections, like interjections in general , are often overlooked in descriptions of the language, English grammars do offer minimal descriptions of the category.
The lexical categories that a given grammar assumes will likely vary from this list. Certainly numerous subcategories can be acknowledged. For instance, one can view pronouns as a subtype of noun, and verbs can be divided into finite verbs and non-finite verbs (e.g. gerund, infinitive, participle, etc.).
Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer. [10] [11] Lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart, is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect.
Argument structure is the list of selected arguments associated with a lexical category, such as a verb (SKS, 2015) [verification needed].When every predicate, otherwise known as a verb, is used, it selects a specific set of arguments that need to be fulfilled to create a well-formed sentence (Kroger, 2005).
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [39] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...