Verb phrases 
p align="left"> … to whom he might transmit the money he saved,…[59, p.66]Of the three classes of verbs, the full verbs can act only as main verbs, the modal auxiliaries can act only as auxiliary verbs, and the primary verbs can act either as main verbs or as auxiliary verbs. Let us investigate the auxiliary verbs closer. Auxiliary verbs. Auxiliaries have little or no lexical meaning. They are `helper' verbs, in the sense that they help to form complex verb forms. In doing so they express either a grammatical notion (like `passive', `progressive' or `tense') or one or more modal ideas. This is not to say that auxiliaries are devoid of meaning, but their meanings are more schematic (i.e. more `skeletal', more `abstract', less `full') than those of lexical verbs. Within the auxiliaries we can make a distinction between two classes: grammatical auxiliaries and modal auxiliaries. The former, which are sometimes referred to as `primary auxiliaries', have a purely grammatical function: 1. the `tense auxiliary' have, which is used in forming perfect tense forms; 2. the `aspect auxiliary' be, which is used for building progressive verb orms; 3. the `voice auxiliary' be, which is used in the passive; 4. the `periphrastic auxiliary' do, which is used as a `dummy' (pro-form) when a VP that does not contain an auxiliary (e. g. love her) is used in a construction that requires one (e. g. I don't love her, Do you love her?, I do love her, etc.) Next, there are the `modal auxiliaries': can, could, may, might, must, shall, should, ought to, will, and would. These auxiliaries express special shades of meaning, such as volition, possibility, permission, necessity, intention, obligation, expectation, inference, ability, determination, etc. The modal auxiliaries differ semantically from the first group in that they add lexical meaning rather than fulfill a grammatical function. However, they still have less concrete, and hence more widely applicable, meanings than most lexical verbs. This wider applicability explains why auxiliaries form a relatively small set when compared with lexical verbs. Because an auxiliary does not have a full lexical meaning, it cannot be used without a main (lexical) verb, except in `code', where the auxiliary is used as pro-form for an entire verb phrase (as in If I do the thing, I will do it thoroughly, but I must have a free hand). In other words, an auxiliary cannot be the only or last verb form in the VP (except in `code'). In the following example the main verbs are italicized while the auxiliaries are underlined: [“What did he do last night?”] - “He {studied / worked / may have slept / could /had to / would}.” Unlike lexical verbs, auxiliaries have the so-called `NICE-properties'. `NICE' is an acronym (coined by Huddleston 1976) consisting of the initial letters of the terms negation, inversion, code and emphasis. The reference is to the four cases in which the English VP requires an auxiliary. If there is no auxiliary, the `periphrastic auxiliary' do has to be added. In that case we say that the lexical verb requires `do-support'. In other words, the statement that `auxiliaries have the NICE-properties' means that they do not combine with the periphrastic auxiliary do in clauses made negative by the use of not, in clauses involving subject-auxiliary inversion, in code and in cases of emphasis. By contrast, clauses without an auxiliary need `do-support' (i.e. the insertion of do) in these four cases. Compare: He went / He didn't go / Did he go? / Yes he did / He did go. He will go / He won't go / Will he go? / Yes he will / He will go. The auxiliary verbs are made up of the modals (may, must, might and so on), have (perfective) and be (progressive and passive). Here it is worth noting some of the uses of the auxiliary function: to construct questions, to provide emphasis and to carry negation. Looking at questions first, the first auxiliary in a verb phrase can be put before the subject in order, to ask a question: She will be coming. Will she be coming? The emphatic use of the auxiliary is connected with stress and intonation patterns, but it is again the first auxiliary that carries the extra emphasis of an emphatic version: Will you ask Mr. Bosinney, and I will get young Flippard.[59, p.66] I will call for you and your young man at seven o'clock.[59, p.23] A Forsyte will require good, if not delicate feeding, but a Dartie will tax the resources of a Crown and Sceptre [59, p.34] His drink, too, will need to be carefully provided; there is much drink in this country 'not good enough' for a Dartie; he will have the best.[59, p.52] The negation of English sentences is usually carried by the verb phrase in the form of a negative particle, which intervenes in the verb phrase after the first auxiliary and before the following auxiliary or lexical verb: If you exceed that sum by as much as fifty pounds, I will not hold you responsible Jane hasn't been hurt.[59, p.33] He knew it was done that he might not feel she came because of her dead lover.[59, p.23] The feeling of shame at what might be called 'running after him' was smothered by the dread that he might not be there, that she might not see him after all 59, p.35] As these examples show, the negative particle is often attached to the auxiliary verb, though in the case of might the reduced form (mightn't) is less common now. All three of these special uses of the auxiliary require some attention to the first auxiliary of a verb phrase. This may be a modal auxiliary or it may be have or be. Whichever it is, this verb is known as the `operator' because it has the special functions described above. In the absence of an auxiliary (that is, where there is only a lexical verb), the dummy operator - the verb do - is used instead: But I suppose you feel it much as I do when I part with a picture--a sort of child?"[59, p.34] But if you ask me how I do it, I answer, because I'm a Forsyte."[59, p.67] The dummy operator, then, performs the three functions of the other auxiliaries, but it does not carry any meaning of its own to add to the verb phrase. Though some verbs have a status intermediate between that of main verbs and that of auxiliary verbs. Sometimes the main verb (and perhaps the other words too) is understood from the context, so that only auxiliaries are present in the verb phrase: I can't tell them but you can. [i.e. `can tell them'] Your parents may not have suspected anything but your sister may have. [i.e. `may have suspected something']. There also multi-word verbs, which consist of a verb and one or more other words turn on, look up, take place, take advantage, put up with,… Let us consider at the individual forms of lexical verbs in English and how they function. The first of the two clauses above also form complete sentences, whereas the third, fourth and fifth are only part of an utterance. These incomplete utterances are examples of subordinate clauses, which we shall investigate in a later section. We are using them here simply to demonstrate the use of particular forms of verb: non-finite forms. These forms, often known as the -ing form, the -en form and the i- form, are also called the progressive form, the perfective form and the infinitive form. These forms can be part of full verb phrases that function as the predicator in a complete clause. On their own, however, they do not link to the subject in a clear way (for example by an ending that indicates a person) and they do not establish the tense of the verb as either present or past. Note how they need auxiliaries to establish such aspects of the meaning of the predicator: Who shall tell of what he was thinking? [59, p.44] And now you have your son and June coming back you will be so happy.[59, p.24] I shall sit in the sun with a drink in my hand.[59, p.20] Lexical verbs that do not need an auxiliary verb in order to function in main clauses are known as finite forms. They include the present tense form, which is normally indistinguishable from the infinitive form in terms of having no morphological suffix (for example catch, sing), the third-person present tense form, which normally adds an -s to base forms, and the past tense form, which adds -ed to regular verbs. Table 3.1 shows some examples of all the forms of English lexical verbs. Table 3.1 |
Citation form | Break | Play | Sing | Forget | | Present tense | break | play | sing | forget | | Present third person | breaks | plays | sings | forgets | | Past tense | broke | played | sang | forgot | | Progressive participle | breaking | playing | singing | forgetting | | Perfective participle | broken | played | sung | forgotten | | Infinitive | break | play | sing | forget | | |
The most common pattern of forms in English verbs is the one represented n the table by play. There are effectively only four different forms (play, plays, playing, played), but because other common, but irregular, verbs distinguish, for example, the past tense (-ed) from the perfective form (-en), the regular verbs are also treated as though these forms were different.The irregular forms tend to belong to common verbs derived from Old English, rather than those with Romance language influences, such as French. Because they are very common they have not changed to match the sheer quantity of verbs with a pattern such as play, although there is some evidence that some such thing is happening. If you think about the way that people these days often muddle sung and sang and rung and rang, it seems that the distinction between past tense and perfective markers is less clear-cut than in the past. However, although the two forms might be merging in irregular verbs too, they are not moving towards matching the regular verbs, which would result in forms such as *singed and *ringed.The subclasses of lexical verb that can be identified tend to depend on the context in which they occur. Whilst the traditional grammars distinguished between transitive and intransitive verbs, we find it useful to distinguish further categories, depending on the clause structures in which they typically occur.The intransitive verb will not be found with an object, and thus will occur n subject and predicator structures: I'm dying. The transitive verb occurs with an object in subject-predicator-object structures: She hates you. Ditransitive verbs occur with both indirect and direct objects: They gave me a beautiful present. There are also subclasses of verb that tend to occur with compulsory adverbials: John went home and I put the cigarette back in the packet.Two further important subclasses of verb are intensive verbs (such as be) that occur with subject complements (She was really tired), and those which occur with objects and object complements: (You make me happy). The intensive verbs have a particular semantic effect in that they invoke existence (there is a tree) and equivalence (she is my daughter). These subcategories of verb are not watertight and some verbs can occur in a range of grammatical contexts. However it is useful to think in terms of verbs typically occurring in certain clause structures.2.2 Verbs within Syntax and MorphologyWhat is the essential property that makes verbs behave differently from nouns nd adjectives in morphology and syntax? There is actually an obvious starting-point in the widespread recognition that verbs are the quintessential predicates. They are inherently unsaturated expressions that hold of something else, and thus the nucleus around which sentences are typically built. Many linguists of different schools have recognized the significance of this. Among the formalists, Jackendoff (1977) partially defines verbs with the feature “+subject” (although this does not distinguish them from nouns, in his view). Among the functionalists Buechler[16, p.54] , identifies predi-cation as the pragmatic function that provides the external motivation for the category verb. The precise version of this intuition stated in (3) (3)X is a verb if and only if X is a lexical category and X has a specifier.Whether an item takes a specifier or not is thus an important characterizing feature for the functional categories. (3) claims that this property subdivides the lexical categories too. Those lexical categories that take a specifier are verbs; those that do not are nouns and adjectives.The way a verb comes to have a specifier is somewhat different from the way ost functional categories do, however. Tenses and complementizers acquire their specifiers by movement: some constituent contained inside their complement moves to become the specifier of the phrase. This is not the case for verbs. Rather, the specifier of a verb usually comes from direct combination with some other phrase that is constructed independently. In Chomsky's terms, verbs typically get specifiers from “External Merge,” whereas tenses and complementizers get specifiers by “Internal Merge.” In practice, this means that verbs usually assign a thematic role to the phrase that is their specifier. Following Chomsky's[21, p.56-366] adaptation of Hale and Keyser (1993), there are two domains in which this happens (also Bowers [1993] and others). A verb that takes an AP or PP complement assigns a theme role to its specifier:(5) a.Cigar made [VP him[ feel faint []] (him is theme of feel) [59]A verb that takes an NP complement assigns an agent role to its specifier:(6). It made [VP him [sick to look at them]] (him is agent of sick)A verb can also take a VP complement, in which case it again assigns an agent ole to its specifier. The head of the lower VP almost always combines with the head of the higher VP, deriving a surface representation with only one spelled-out verb:Examples in which a single verb appears to take two complements are always to be analyzed this way, as consisting of two verbal projections that take one comple-ment each, following Levinson [36] Palmer [41], and using Chomsky's [21] terminology, we can call the higher verbal position in structures like (5)(in lower case), and the lower position V (in upper case). Both, however, qualify as verbs, as long as they have lexical content, given the definition in (1)The structures in (5) (6) also exist without an overt NP, AP, or PP complement o the verb:(7) a Cigar made [him [feel - ]] [59, p.76] b It made [him [sick - ]] [59, p.76]So the verbs have a covert complement in these cases, so that the theme and agent arguments are still in specifier positions. Hutchby and Wooffitt [30] actually make a somewhat stronger claim: they say that these phrase-structural configurations are the only ones in which NPs that bear theme and agent roles can be found. Let us consider the following:Agent and theme roles can only be assigned to specifier positions.This is a subpart of the Uniformity of Theta Role Assignment Hypothesis (UTAH) of Baker (1988a), which Hutchby and Wooffitt [30, p.543] seek to derive. (6) is weaker than Hutchby and Wooffitt's view, the agent role simply is the [??V VP] configuration, they believe, and the theme role is the [??V AP/PP] configuration. (In this, they were presumably inspired by Carter's [19, p.45] view that thematic roles are designated positions in a conceptual structure.) The definitional view seems too strong, however. (6) is strong enough to have consequences: taken together with (4), it implies that simple nouns and adjectives can never assign agent or theme thematic roles.
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