A stretched verb is a

complex predicate 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 ...

composed of a light verb and an eventive

noun In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an Object (grammar), object or Subject (grammar), subject within a p ...

. An example is the English phrase "take a bite out of", which is semantically similar to the simple verb "bite". The concept has been used in studies of

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

and English. Other names for a stretched verb include "supported verb", "expanded predicate", "verbo-nominal phrase", and "delexical verb combination". Some definitions may place further restrictions on the construction: restricting the light verb to one of a fixed list; restricting the occurrence of articles,

preposition Adpositions are a part of speech, class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in, under, towards, behind, ago'', etc.) or mark various thematic relations, semantic roles (''of, for''). The most common adpositions are prepositi ...

s, or

adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, an adjective, another adverb, a determiner, a clause, a preposition, or a sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, or level of certainty by ...

s within the complex phrase; requiring the eventive noun to be identical or

cognate In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical effects on both the s ...

with a synonymous simple verb, or at least requiring the stretched verb to be synonymous with some simple verb. In English, many stretched verbs are more common than a corresponding simple verb: for example "get rid f X from Y compared to the verb "rid of X; or "offer (one's) condolences o X vs "condole ith X. Correct use of stretched verbs is about as difficult for EFL students as other types of

collocation In corpus linguistics, a collocation is a series of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, a collocation is a type of compositional phraseme, meaning that it can be understood from the words t ...

.Nesselhauf, §5.1.3, pp.211–214

References

Verb types Lexical units {{syntax-stub

See also

References