In linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi-word compound that acts as a single verb. One component of the compound is a light verb or vector, which carries any inflections, indicating tense, mood, or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning. The other, "primary", component is a verb or noun which carries most of the semantics of the compound, and determines its arguments. It is usually in either base or conjunctive participial form.
A compound verb is also called a "complex predicate" because the semantics, as formally modeled by a predicate, is determined by the primary verb, though both verbs appear in the surface form. Whether Noun+Verb (N+V) compounds are considered to be "compound verbs" is a matter of naming convention. Generally, the term complex predicate usually includes N+V compounds, whereas the term compound verb is usually reserved for V+V compounds. However, several authors also refer to N+V compounds as compound verbs.
Compound verbs are to be distinguished from serial verbs which typically signify a sequence of actions, and in which the verbs are relatively equal in semantic and grammatical weight, and from auxiliary verbs.
Read more about Compound Verb: Structure, Languages With Compound Verbs, Historical Processes and Grammaticalization
Other articles related to "verb, verbs, compound verb, compound":
... Verb–verb compounds are sequences of more than one verb acting together to determine clause structure ... They have two types In a serial verb, two actions, often sequential, are expressed in a single clause ... In each case, the two verbs together determine the semantics and argument structure ...
... As languages change, the vector or light verb may retain its original meaning to different degrees of bleaching, part of the process of grammaticalization ... Thus, in the Hindi compound nikal paRā (exit+fall), paRā has almost none of its "fall" meaning, though some of the finality of the fall also is ... (start) retains a good deal of its independent word meaning even in the compound ...
Famous quotes containing the words verb and/or compound:
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