Syntactic function VPi
complex intransitive verbal, complex verbal unit
(For the often problematic but still important distinction with the category vvi "intransitive verbal binome the constituents of which have no independent meaning" see Kennedy, "Butterfly". As for reduplicated verbs, they have been classified, preliminarily, as vi.red.) Complex intransitive verbs may or may not be semantically transitive, and when they are, they are labelled as VPi - tr. In principle, a verbal expression counts as complex only if its constituent syllables have independent meaning. This is often difficult to ascertain. A word may always cooccur with a certain other word and still have its independent meaning. In doubtful cases we assume independent meaning. A bisyllabic intranstive verbal where the constituent syllables are taken not to have independent meaning is categorised as vvi.
Usage
- Lexical entries:
- Found 4778 attributions