Talk:Verb phrase

message: Sir/Madam,
Whatever has been said about Verb Phrase is thoroughly wrong. The writer is not well acquainted with what he has written. 
Verb Phrase means merely the verb element of a clause. It comprises merely the main verb and the auxiliary that may be up-to four in number at most. The main verb is the obligatory element of the verb phrase and auxiliary is it's optional element. 
She could have been being taught English then. 
Here "could have been being taught" is the verb phrase. 
Ref. : Geoffery Leech: English  Grammar for Today. 
 Birbal Kumawat (talk) 04:09, 9 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Verb Phrase  

message: I'm asking from an axiomatic set theory angle as this article indicates that a verb phrase is not to be confused with phrasal verb. Fundamentally speaking, I believe misguided attempts at pedantics generally demonstrate a disregard for semantics, or, in this case, the neglect of practical linguistic entailments. Kent Dominic 05:18, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Isn't a "phrasal verb" a subset of the "verb phrase" set? 

message: I'm loathe to offer negative criticisms without proffering at least one prospective solution. Accordingly, I think the Verb phrase article contains some shortcomings that can be remedied under an approach that deviates from the article's definitional premise.
In my book (figuratively speaking and literally speaking with regard to my soon-to-be-published compendium of English grammar terms), the notions that underlie a term such as verb phrase are too vast to properly explain within the purview of a single sense of the term. As it currently stands, I think this article's introductory paragraph is overly ambitious in its attempt to capture the various senses of what a verb phrase entails. The paragraph cobbles numerous ideas gleaned from divergent linguistic theories and aggregates them into an introductory sentence whose "but not always" caveat is defensible from a linguistic perspective but likely unhelpful to readers who are unfamiliar with distinctions between dependency grammars, phrase structure grammars, and the old school grammatical notion of predicate.
In my preferred approach to phraseology, each word in a phrase should have one or more sets of axiomatic meanings so that a combination of words into a phrase is limited to the exact set of senses that the combination entails. Thus, various senses of the word, verb, correspond uniquely to their sets of given meanings; various senses of the word phrase corresponds to their own sets of given meanings; verb phrase can have no other meaning than the aggregate meanings implied by the union of sets that respectively comprise the verb  set and phrase set.
My own paradigmatic approach includes fundamental terms such as noun, verb, preposition, phrase, etc. and collocations such as noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, etc. My definition for verb phrase entails my one and only sense given for verb and one of eight senses given for phrase. The resulting meaning is:
:verb phrase (grammar) - 
::1. a catena or phrase that constitutes a verb. See:
::* causative verb phrase (e.g. have someone help)
::* double-modal verb phrase (e.g. this might could work; nonstandard)
::* finite verb phrase (e.g. go see a doctor)
::* elliptical verb phrase (e.g. They haven't yet, but I think they have to.)
::* intransitive verb phrase (e.g. please stop)
::* modal verb phrase (e.g. this could work)
::* nonfinite verb phrase (e.g. begging for a raise is pointless)
::* phrasal verb (e.g. keep off the grass)
::* predicate verb phrase (e.g. I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree)
::* stative verb phrase (e.g. She is leaving tomorrow)
::* split to-infinitive phrase (e.g. I want to always try my hardest)
::* split verb phrase (e.g. We had never seen such a thing)
::* to-infinitive phrase (e.g. It's time to rock.)
::* transitive verb phrase (e.g. I adore you.)
::* verb catena (e.g. He could not have avoided seeing it)
:2. a phrase comprised of a verb that entails one or more dependent words . See:
::* adverb (e.g. I would never do such a thing_
::* adverbial phrase (e.g. I would hardly ever do such things)
::* dative object (e.g. Please give me a hint) [Note: My compendium defines but doesn't paradigmatically employ the term, indirect object.]
::* noun phrase (e.g. Do you like French Creole music?)
::* transitive object (e.g. Yes, I love it!  It's the first kind that I played as a child.) [Note1: This a tricky sentence to parse as "the first kind is both a stative object re. "it's" and a transitive object re. "played;" Note2: My compendium defines the term, subject complement but uses the term, stative object as one of several lexical categories that can complement a stative verb, which I've defined more narrowly than the ways that are discussed in the stative verb article.]
:See generally verb and phrase (wherein verb entails 1  meaning with 151 collocations and phrase entails one applicable meaning with 1,422 collocations.
In short, when I read an article like Verb phrase, I credit everyone's attempts to synopsize the term, I sympathize with readers who don't recognize the undependability of definitions that are unwittingly rooted on a naive set theory basis, and I shake my head at Talkers who are quick to criticize the flaws in articles such as these but neither invest nor endure the time and effort required to improve them or to rationally refute whatever ails them. 
Kent Dominic 16:00, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  A paradigmatic approach to defining "verb phrase" 

message: This article doesn't suffice to explain how the subject of so-called content clause is embedded within the verb phrase of an independent clause, e.g., in "He told her (that) she was smart," she is the subject of the "she was smart" content clause which, in its entirety, is the object of the verb phrase, told her (that) she was smart (i.e., where "told" is part of the he told her independent clause). Traditional grammar terms have limitations for which modern terms provide mere band-aid remedies. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 19:35, 14 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Verb phrase nexus to content clause