Compound verb

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Compound verb" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (October 2007) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Part of a series on
English grammar
Morphology Plurals Prefixes (in English) Suffixes (frequentative)
Word types Acronyms Adjectives Adverbs (flat) Articles Coordinators Compounds Demonstratives Determiners (List here) Expletives Intensifier Interjections Interrogatives Nouns Portmanteaus Possessives Prepositions (List here) Pronouns (case · person) Subordinators Verbs
Verbs Auxiliary verbs Mood (conditional · imperative · subjunctive) Aspect (continuous · habitual · perfect) -ing Irregular verbs Modal verbs Passive voice Phrasal verbs Verb usage Transitive and intransitive verbs
Syntax Clauses (in English) Conditional sentences Copula Do-support Inversion Periphrasis Zero-marking
Orthography Abbreviations Capitalization Comma Hyphen
Variant usage African-American Vernacular English AmE and BrE grammatical differences Double negatives Grammar disputes Thou
v t e

In linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi-word compound that functions as a single verb. One component of the compound is a light verb or vector, which carries any inflections, indicating tense, mood, or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning. The other, "primary", component is a verb or noun which carries most of the semantics of the compound, and determines its arguments. It is usually in either base or [in Verb + Verb compounds] conjunctive participial form.

A compound verb is also called a "complex predicate" because the semantics, as formally modeled by a predicate, is determined by the primary verb, though both verbs appear in the surface form. Whether Noun+Verb (N+V) compounds are considered to be "compound verbs" is a matter of naming convention. Generally, the term complex predicate usually includes N+V compounds, whereas the term compound verb is usually reserved for V+V compounds. However, several authors [especially Iranists] refer to N+V compounds as compound verbs.^[1]

Compound verbs are to be distinguished from serial verbs which typically signify a sequence of actions, and in which the verbs are relatively equal in semantic and grammatical weight. They are also to be distinguished from sequences of auxiliary plus main verbs.