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Topic: Verb phrase

These resources cover verb phrases: phrases with a verb as the Head word. A verb phrase can have a main verb on its own (e.g. He gobbled the chocolate), or a main verb together with one or more helping verbs called auxiliary verbs (e.g. He is gobbling the chocolate; He has been gobbling chocolate all morning).

Identify the type of phrase

Identify the type of phrase (noun phrase, preposition phrase, etc.) in each of the examples. Although we have included verb phrases as an option, remember that the National Curriculum calls these clauses.

 

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Aspect and tense

Look at the highlighted verb phrase in each example, then decide which combination of tense and aspect is used.

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Perfect or progressive aspect?

Decide whether the highlighted verb phrase is perfect aspect or progressive aspect?

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Clauses

Clauses are considered to be very important units in the study of language. But what is a clause? What makes it different from a word, a phrase, or a sentence? Why are clauses so important?

A clause is a powerful structure because it can express a whole situation. Here’s an example:

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Building verb phrases

In this resource we’ll look at how verb phrases can be built up by putting auxiliary verbs and main verbs together.

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Verb phrases

The National Curriculum does not recognise verb phrases as such. Instead, the notion of clause is defined as "a special type of phrase whose head is a verb".

Here at Englicious we use the term 'verb phrase' in a slightly different way. For us verb phrases are phrases whose Head word is a verb, called the main verb (sometimes also called a lexical verb).

A verb phrase includes a single main verb, either:

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Phrases

A phrase consists of one or more words that belong together. It takes one of the major word class elements (noun, adjective, etc.) as its Head.

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Tense and aspect in fiction

Exploring the use of tense and aspect in a range of literary texts

In this activity we will examine some short extracts from novels. The idea is to look at the tense and aspect forms used, and think about how they are used to unfold the action of the story.

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