Contributors cover such topic as synchronic and diachronic evidence for parallels between noun phrases and sentences, the development of Creole languages, oppositions from proto-Indo-European to Latin, the development of early to late Latin, the history of two Greek tenses, actionality and aspect in Hittite, imperfectivity and complete events, transitions in Portuguese and Spanish, the old Nordic middle voice, tense and aspect in Semitic languages, the verb phrase in the Kerebe language, comparative TAM morphology in Niger-Congo, indexicals in Australian languages, and differential object marking in Sahidic Coptic.
Additionally, in drawings coded as teacher-centered, preservice elementary teachers used verbs or verb phrases such as watching, taking notes, following along, listening, and practicing to describe what students were doing, while in drawings coded as student-centered, the preservice teachers used verbs or verb phrases such as exploring, working together, actively involved, or questioning to describe student behavior.
Although tensed verb phrases are many times more common than verb phrases with a modal, Biber et al (1999: 491) report from corpus evidence that "the strongest association with modal verbs (rather than tense) are mostly mental verbs.
Consider the verb phrase "take away" and the verb "break" used to describe what would happen to the filibuster rather than a more neutral word like "end.
In the early days of the transformational approach to syntax, Chomsky (8) gave the following re-write rule for a sentence (S): (N1) S [right arrow] NP + VP, where NP represents noun phrase, and VP represents verb phrase.
He proposed that instructions that use verb phrases such as "goes with," and so forth, may be sufficient to establish equivalent classes in those subjects for whom the relation "goes with" is already an equivalence relation.
