A student came to me with a question about ‘two verbs together’ in a sentence and I didn’t know how to answer it. I’ve tried to find the answer in a copy of Swan’s Practical English Usage and would appreciate it if someone could check that I’m on the right track.
The student’s example sentences were:
The two ‘verbs’ are in bold. My initial thought was that these two parts of speech are not actually verbs. Could it be that both ‘in’ and ‘on’ are prepositions connecting the following nouns ‘love’ and ‘demand’?
I’ve also read about adverb particles such as ‘walk out’, however it seems that in all of the examples I saw the adverb particle went after the verb.
The only other possibility that I saw was that they could be phrasal verbs. For example the ‘got up’ in the sentence ‘I got up at 7am.’
Could somebody please enlighten me as to what part of speech these two lexical items have so that if someone asks me the same question again I’ll know how to answer it?
The first (in love) is an adjective. Compare: “The boy and girl are smart.”
The second (on demand) is an adverb. Compare: “I like to watch movies quickly.”
[quote=“Chris”]The first (in love) is an adjective. Compare: “The boy and girl are smart.”
The second (on demand) is an adverb. Compare: “I like to watch movies quickly.”[/quote]
Thanks for the quick reply, Chris.
If ‘love’ here is being used as an adjective, can we identify the ‘in’ as being a link verb? According to Swan, link verbs are used to join an adjective or noun complement to a subject. In sentence #1 the subject of the sentence is ‘The boy and girl’, therefore ‘is’ (or ‘are’ in your example sentence) link the final adjective ‘love’ (or ‘smart’ in your example) to the subjects.
[quote=“Milkybar_Kid”][quote=“Chris”]The first (in love) is an adjective. Compare: “The boy and girl are smart.”
The second (on demand) is an adverb. Compare: “I like to watch movies quickly.”[/quote]
Thanks for the quick reply, Chris.
If ‘love’ here is being used as an adjective, can we identify the ‘in’ as being a link verb? According to Swan, link verbs are used to join an adjective or noun complement to a subject. In sentence #1 the subject of the sentence is ‘The boy and girl’, therefore ‘is’ (or ‘are’ in your example sentence) link the final adjective ‘love’ (or ‘smart’ in your example) to the subjects.
Wishing you a Happy New Year.[/quote]
The adjective is “in love”, not “love”. It is composed of a preposition (“in”) and a noun (“love”), but together they should be thought of as one unit, which in this case is an adjective.
Can you recommend a good grammar book that would be helpful to refer to in cases like these. I currently use Michael Swan’s ‘Practical English Usage’, which is a 658-page tome all about English usage, however it doesn’t cover what we’ve talked about today.
That seems like a good idea. I would characterize both items as propositional phrases, each having a preposition and a noun. As has been noted, the first is adjectivial and the latter adverbial.
Eh, sorry, but, “in love,” in, “The boy and girl are in love,” is not an adjective. It’s clearly a prepositional phrase.
OP, I’m going to remove the conjunct “and girl” and simplify the constituency tree in ways that you won’t miss to give you the core of what you’re missing:
Paste the string “[color=#00BF40][CP [C ] [TP [DP [D The] [NP [N boy]]] [VP [V is] [RP [PP [P in] [DP [D _] [NP [N love]]]]]]]][/color]” into this site.
It’s plain to see that there are no adjectives anywhere in the sentence.
Your second sentence has the same issue. It’s a prepositional phrase.