verb phrase
Action with words
A verb phrase is a verb plus any words that complete or modify it—auxiliaries, objects, adverbs, or complements.
In She has been waiting for hours, everything after "She" forms the verb phrase.
The term appears mainly in grammar instruction, where identifying verb phrases helps students analyze sentence structure.
- active voiceSubject performs the verb
- predicateSentence's non-subject portion
- infinitiveUnconjugated verb form
- split infinitiveAdverb bisecting an infinitive
- main clauseSelf-sufficient sentence portion
direct object · indirect object · locution · gerund · dangling modifier · transitivity · passive voice · linking · syntax · action · action word · helping · perfect · conjugate · main · modal · copula · progressive
- phrasesnoun phrases, prepositional phrases, idiom, idioms, clause
- grammardeclension, pronouns, adjectives, conjugation, nouns
- grammar termsnoun, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition
- linguisticslinguistics, phoneme, phonemes, morpheme, morphemes
- linguistic unitsword, morpheme, phoneme, grapheme, syllable
- syntaxsentence, noun, adjective, adverb, subject
grammatical constituent type
verb phrasenoun phrase
Multi-word noun construction
NP · subject · object · prepositional phrase · complement
phrase, verb, verbal, phrasing, verbs, verbalize, phrased, verbiage, phraseology