The ‘verb’ element in a sentence is not necessarily just a single word. It would be more satisfactory to call it a verb phrase, which may be just one verb, or may be made up of several verbs. The examples given above have just one verb in the verb phrase: e.g. barks, disappeared, explained, but in the following the verb phrases contain two or more verbs: My landlady has been cooking Beetles were crawling The ship has disappeared The verb phrases here are has been cooking, were crawling and has disappeared. Were crawling is in the past tense; the others are in the present tense. (It is the first word that signals the choice of tense, has v. had, are v. were, explain v. explained, etc.) The last verb in a verb phrase is the main verb. The words that precede the main verb, if any, are auxiliary verbs. In the examples cited just above, the auxiliary verbs are has been, were and has respectively. The main verb is the most essential part of the construction; it is the word, if there is one, that has denotative meaning. Furthermore, it is the element in the verb phrase that is obligatorily present. So, if there is only one word, it has to be the main verb. The only exception to this statement is when the construction is deliberately left incomplete. For example, A I didn’t know John had finished B Well, he has An expression like He has, which is left incomplete and has to be interpreted by reference to the verbal context, is said to be elliptical. (It is an instance of ellipsis.) Here, of course, the verb phrase has contains no main verb but, all the same, a main verb is an obligatory element in the interpretation of the construction. Auxiliary verbs, in contrast to main verbs, are subsidiary to the main verb and they contribute special kinds of grammatical meaning (see the next section). Figure 13 gives some idea of the range of combinations of verbs that make up verb phrases. It is not an exhaustive display of possible types of verb phrase, but it is sufficient for present purposes. The numbers and letters in Figure 13
are referred to below (pp. 39–40).