A stretched verb is a complex predicate composed of a light verb and an eventive

noun A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, ...

. An example is the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

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 (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **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

article Article often refers to: * Article (grammar), a grammatical element used to indicate definiteness or indefiniteness * Article (publishing), a piece of nonfictional prose that is an independent part of a publication Article may also refer to: ...

preposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...

s, or

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

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 in different languages that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language. Because language change can have radical ef ...

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 ...

.Nesselhauf, §5.1.3, pp.211–214

References

Verb types Lexical units {{syntax-stub

See also

References