Remember the sentence, The little boy laughed? As we talked about earlier, The little boy is a noun phrase (see Lesson 28) and laughed is a verb phrase. There are different kinds of verb phrases, and we can begin to discover them by seeing what we can substitute for the verb phrase, laughed, in this sentence. The underlined portions of the sentences below are all verb phrases, and any one of them can replace laughed in the sentence, The little boy laughed.
The little boy left.
The little boy chased the ball.
The little boy chased the red ball.
The little boy chased it.
The little boy chased Henry.
Of course, there are lots of things that cannot replace laughed in this sentence, for example:
6. *The little boy his extremely.
7. *The little boy near from.
8. *The little boy they.
You're probably not surprised to learn that his extremely, near from, and they are not verb phrases.
Have you noticed anything that all the underlined verb phrases in sentences 1–5 have in common? Each verb phrase has a verb. In fact, in sentence 1, the verb phrase has nothing in it but a verb, left. A verb phrase may also have other words, as you can see in sentences 2–5, but the least that every verb phrase has to have is a verb. (See Unit 2 to remind yourself about verbs.)
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