Lesson 9 | Digging Deeper into Nonverbal Phrases
What Is a Nonverbal Phrase?
As you learned in Lesson 7, the nine different types of phrases (see Lesson 1) can be divided into two families: verbal and nonverbal. In Lessons 7-8, we studied verbal phrases, which are phrases that contain a finite verb or a verbal (like a participle or an infinitive).
In this lesson, we will study nonverbal phrases, which are phrases that do not contain a finite verb or a verbal. Review the graphic below to refresh your memory of which types of phrases are included in this category.
We already covered genitive phrases in detail in Lesson 5, so we won’t go through them again here. This lesson will focus on the remaining three nonverbal phrases: prepositional phrases, appositional phrases, and substantival phrases.
As you can see in the above graphic, not every appositional and substantival phrase is nonverbal. However, most of them are, and so they are included in this lesson.