Word classes in English - Grammatical categories

It is now known that the basic sentence consists of a Noun Phrase (functioning as subject) followed by a Verb Phrase (functioning as predicate) (Burton-Roberts, 2016, p.65). There are several examples of VPs, though very little has been said about them. This chapter deals with the general structure (the immediate constituents) of the VP half of the basic sentence. As these VPs illustrate, categories may appear in the VP, including Noun Phrases. Within the VP, however, NPs have different functions. It’s these different functions of NP and other categories of phrases that are going to be mentioned here. There are two kinds of verb in English: lexical and auxiliary (Burton-Roberts, 2016,p.65). Lexical verbs are the ones that belong to the indefinitely large general vocabulary of the language (e.g. run, eat, seem, explain, recycle, shatter, prepare, depend). Auxiliary verbs, by contrast, are a special and very restricted set of verbs. The clear ones are: be, have, and do (which can also be lexical) and can/could, will/would, shall/should, may/might, must, and need. All mentioned verbs will be precisly defined in these paper.