verbfrangere

Verbfrangere is a neologism used in theoretical linguistics to describe the phenomenon of breaking a verb's morphology or its semantic content into separate components for analysis. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in discussions on morphology, valency, and periphrasis.

Origin and terminology: The word combines English verb with the Latin frangere, meaning to break, signaling a metaphor: a verb is treated as something that can be split into parts. In some texts it is written as verb-frangere or verbfrangere.

Conceptual scope: Verbfrangere can refer to morphological fragmentation, where tense, aspect, mood, or voice are realized on different morphemes or auxiliary tokens rather than in a single inflected form; and to syntactic fragmentation, where a verb's semantic contribution is distributed across multiple words in periphrastic constructions. It is closely related to discussions of light-verb constructions, auxiliary verbs, and verbal periphrasis.

Examples: In English, "I have eaten" can be described as a verbfrangere of "eat," with "eat" as the lexical verb and "have" as an auxiliary encoding perfect aspect. In French, "Je vais manger" (I am going to eat) distributes intention and action across "vais" and "manger," illustrating a syntactic distribution of verbal meaning. These are analytic uses used for illustration and not a standard classification in mainstream grammars.

Reception and critique: The concept is primarily pedagogical or theoretical, used to emphasize fragmentation and decomposition in verbal systems. Critics argue that it risks conflating distinct processes (inflection, periphrasis, lexical derivation) under a single label. Its practical adoption remains limited to niche discussions and teaching resources.