VPs Narrowly Defined
Verb phrases are sometimes defined more narrowly in scope to allow for only those sentence elements that are strictly considered verbal elements to form verb phrases. According to such a definition, verb phrases consist only of main verbs, auxiliary verbs, and other infinitive or participle constructions. For example, in the following sentences only the words in bold would be considered to form the verb phrase for each sentence:
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- John has given Mary a book.
- They were being eaten alive.
- She kept screaming like a maniac.
- Thou shall not kill.
This more narrow definition is often applied in functionalist frameworks and traditional European reference grammars. It is incompatible with the phrase structure understanding of the verb phrase, since the strings in bold are not constituents under standard analyses. It is, however, compatible with those grammars, in particular dependency grammars, that view the catena as the fundamental unit of syntactic structure as opposed to the constituent. Furthermore, the verbal elements in bold are syntactic units consistent with the understanding of predicates in the tradition of predicate calculus.
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