Verbcentered

Verb-centered is an adjective used to describe approaches, analyses, or theories that place verbs at the center of linguistic representation, cognitive processing, or pedagogy. In such frameworks, verbs are viewed as the core carriers of action, event structure, and argument relations, with other elements treated in relation to the predicate.

In linguistic theory, verb-centered perspectives emphasize predicate-argument structure, aspect, and event semantics. They may treat verbs as the primary lexical items around which syntactic structure is organized, and they often examine valency, voice, and morphology as properties of the verb rather than of entire clauses alone. Cross-linguistic work notes varying degrees of verb-centricity, with some languages encoding most grammatical information on the verb.

In language education, verb-centered instruction focuses on teaching verbs, their forms, and their syntactic frames, along with common collocations and semantic roles. Proponents argue that strong verb mastery supports faster sentence production and comprehension, particularly for learners of second languages.

In computational linguistics and natural language processing, a verb-centered approach can guide parsing, semantic role labeling, and event extraction by prioritizing verb phrases and their argument structures for representing meaning and relationships between entities.

The term verb-centered is not universally standardized and may be used differently across disciplines. When encountered, it generally signals a focus on verbs as the central element of analysis or instruction rather than nouns or full sentence structure alone.