mainverb

A main verb is the verb in a clause that carries the core lexical meaning of the predicate. It is typically distinguished from auxiliary verbs, which help express tense, aspect, mood, voice, or modality rather than the main event or state described.

In many languages, the main verb bears the principal semantic content and, depending on the language, agrees with the subject for person or number or takes verbal morphology to indicate tense or aspect. Auxiliary verbs combine with the main verb to form complex predicate structures, such as have eaten, will go, or can swim. In English, for example, in the sentence The cat chased the mouse, chased is the main verb, while there may be no auxiliary; in The cat has chased the mouse, has is auxiliary and chased is the main verb.

The exact identification of the main verb can vary by grammatical framework. In dependency grammar, the main verb is often treated as the head of the verb phrase, with auxiliary and modal verbs attaching as dependents. In traditional grammars, the main verb is the lexical verb that carries the central event or state, while helping verbs are categorized separately.

Cross-linguistically, some languages rely heavily on auxiliary constructions or on inflectional suffixes within the main verb to express tense or aspect, while others use separate auxiliary words. The concept of a main verb is thus a practical way to distinguish the core action or state from helper elements within a predicate.

In natural language processing and linguistics, identifying the main verb aids tasks such as lemmatization, morphological analysis, and predicate-argument structure extraction.