Lesson 7 | Digging Deeper into Verbal Phrases, Part 1
What Is a Verbal Phrase?
Remember the nine different types of phrases you learned in Lesson 1? They were conjunction phrases, participle phrases, infinitive phrases, prepositional phrases, appositional phrases, relative phrases, substantival phrases, genitive phrases, and unmarked phrases.
These phrase types can be divided into two families: verbal and nonverbal.
A verbal phrase is simply a phrase that contains a finite verb or a verbal (like a participle or an infinitive). In traditional grammatical terminology, it is a clause.
A nonverbal phrase is a phrase that contains neither.
There are some types of phrases which at times have a verb, and other times do not. For instance, conjunction phrases usually do contain verbs, and so I included them in the verbal phrase family in the graphic above. But other types of phrases are always verbal; still others can be either verbal or nonverbal, and some are usually nonverbal. So a more accurate depiction of the two families is seen below:
We will fill in the details of verbal phrases over the next two lessons. Lesson 7 (this lesson) will cover unmarked and conjunction phrases, while Lesson 8 will fill in details on relative, participle, and infinitive phrases. Then Lesson 9 will explain the nitty-gritty of nonverbal phrases.
Now that you know what verbal phrases are, let’s get up close and personal with the first type of verbal phrase: unmarked phrases.