State and action verbs
A verb refers to an action, event or state. …

Examples of main verb

main verb
If, at the beginning of processing no mainverb is found, the system considers two possible relational verbs: have and be.
In addition, the semantic case preferences for the mainverb are added to the resulting frame.
If they did, then we would expect mainverb usages to appear, which are common in other languages where modals are main verbs.
Therefore, the unit of production during lexical selection must be either a basic clause or an utterance without a mainverb.
So far the results confirm that modifier uses of epistemic verbs have significantly higher zero rates than mainverb uses.
The speaker's stance is neither necessarily contained in the mainverb nor in get, but is retrievable from the context.
To demonstrate this point, consider one of the clause types discussed earlier, clauses with the finite auxiliary after the nonfinite mainverb.
The inputs to the network consisted of five word positions: an introductory word, an optional adjective, the subject noun, an adverb, and the mainverb.
Each conversation was divided into basic clauses, defined as utterances that contain maximally (but not minimally) one mainverb.
The finite verb may be either a mainverb or an auxiliary.
The priming studies that were reviewed supported a prediction that gender agreement marking would facilitate processing of the subject noun and/or the mainverb.
Ten percent of the participants' use of do as a mainverb was independently coded by a different research assistant for each round.
Grammatically the subjunctive clause, instead of being the object of the mainverb, becomes its adverbial modifier.
Both cases involve non-finite complements, of a mainverb in (i) below, and of a copula in (ii).
The temporal anchoring accomplished by moving the mainverb is now accomplished by the verb combinationin ' 'is running' '.
See all examples of main verb
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.