Main verb

Question

"Not since the disputed election of 1923 has a candidate for House speaker faced the public scrutiny of convening a new session of Congress only to have it descend into political chaos, with one vote after another, until a new speaker is chosen."

From the AP.

Is "faced" a main verb in the sentence above?

CalifJim · Accepted Answer

anonymousIs "faced" the main verb in the sentence above?

Yes.

CJ

Anonymous · Answer

anonymous
"Not since the disputed election of 1923 has a candidate for House speaker faced the public scrutiny of convening a new session of Congress only to have it descend into political chaos, with one vote after another, until a new speaker is chosen."
From the AP.
Is "faced" a main verb in the sentence above?

[Not since the disputed election of 1923 has [a candidate for House speaker faced the public scrutiny of [convening a new session of Congress]]] ...

In traditional old-fashioned grammar, auxiliary verbs are contrasted with 'main verbs' so that in, for example, Ed is writing a book, "is writing" forms a syntactic unit in which the 'main verb' "writing" is head and the auxiliary verb "is" is simply a dependent. On this analysis, "is" is thus not a 'main verb'.

But in modern grammar there is no such contrast between 'main verbs' and auxiliary verbs so in the example I gave above, "is" is just as much a 'main verb' as "writing".

In the first part of your example, above, there are three clause, as bracketed, and thus three verbs, i.e. "has", "faced" and "convening" and they are each head of their respective clause. The outer brackets surround the matrix clause and the inner brackets the subordinate clauses.

Main verb

Top answer

Get the Weekly English Kit 📬

Related Questions