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Consider the following constructions. take lessons, give lessens, take a nap, take a shower, go to sleep, go to school, have time, spend time, play football, suffer damage, do homework, do a mistake, make a mistake, make a decision, say prayers, ...

  • What such constructions are called? (compound verb? phrasal verb? idioms?....)

  • What is the role of the noun (school, time, damage) in these constructions? are they all adverbs or part of an adverbial phrase?

  • Why the noun in these construction doesn't take any article? Does it make them generic? if they are even countable?

  • How can I distinguish them? Why I can say go to school but not go to jungle?

For some of them like (go to sleep, take lessens, have time, take a nap) the verb (do, take, have) without the noun has less meaning in the context.

Ahmad
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  • As a note, "go to hospital" and "go to university" and some other similar constructions are common in British English but are not used in American English, so what may be OK in some version of English isn't necessarily ok in another. – Catija Aug 06 '15 at 08:25
  • @Catija then what they use to say go to university or go to hospital, as they are also present in Persian too. – Ahmad Aug 06 '15 at 08:31
  • We (I'm an American) say "I'm going to the hospital." ... We don't say "go to university" but that's mostly because we say "go to college". We don't tend to use "university" in the same way they do in BrE. – Catija Aug 06 '15 at 08:35
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    Can I ask you why you would like to give a name to these types of constructions? What are you trying to achieve by having one? – JMB Aug 06 '15 at 08:41
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    @JMB In this day of information, wouldn't you think that knowing the name of something would make it easier to learn about it? Searching the web for "white and black animal" gives you many different animals to choose from but searching for "zebra" gives you only one. – Catija Aug 06 '15 at 08:45
  • @Catija Sure, I get that. However, I feel that given the seemingly wide range of phrases the OP gave, he might be better off simply learning verb + noun phrases that don't require an article as he finds them. I just wasn't sure there is a tangible group word to give him. – JMB Aug 06 '15 at 10:02
  • @JMB They all have something in common and I was looking for that similarity, if you see exceptions please let me know, for example say prayers is neither say nor prayers, go to school doesn't mean going to a specific place, but it just means to start education.... in Persian we call them compound verbs (if I don't mistake) – Ahmad Aug 06 '15 at 11:49
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    They are not quite the same thing, even though all of them could be considered "verb phrases" (VP). Also, it may be a good idea to separate what they are from their functions. Let's try I go to school and I play football. Go to school is a VP; so is play football. To school is a prepositional phrase, but football is a noun. To school functions as an adverb (thus we can call it an "adverbial prepositional phrase"), but football is the "object" of that sentence. IMHO, your questions are not tightly related, and thus this ELL Question is too broad. – Damkerng T. Aug 06 '15 at 12:17
  • @DamkerngT. You may be right. Please post your answer and explain it more so I can get what is "verb phrase"?! – Ahmad Aug 06 '15 at 18:47
  • Thanks for the invitation! however, I sincerely think that some questions in this Question are better asked on their own. For example, an old answer of mine, Why is there no article “the” before “bed” in “in bed”?, may address the article issue more adequately. As for "verb phrase", as far as I can tell, most people seem to use the term to include everything in a clause except the subject, but others use it to refer to only the verb group. This so called "narrow definition" of "verb phrase" is discussed shortly on Wikipedia. – Damkerng T. Aug 06 '15 at 23:44
  • It looks to me like you are trying to find an English parallel to Persian compound verbs, constructions with a 'light verb' and a non-verb which we call complex predicates. This is way over my head in both languages, and I have asked one of our contributors, a native speaker of Persian, to lend a hand; but I can tell you that these constructions are so uncommon in English that they are rarely addressed in any but the most sophisticated linguistic analysis. – StoneyB on hiatus Aug 08 '15 at 00:31
  • @StoneyB Then you pointed to complex predicates, maybe you can bring examples of them? yes in Persian most compound verbs are something like do homework or give lessen where do and give are light verbs, however go, hit, beat or any other verb could play that role too. for example melt = go/become + water in Persian – Ahmad Aug 08 '15 at 06:19
  • @StoneyB Also, I used Persian compound verbs analogy to find an answer to the question, the comparison is not my end in this question. I want to distinguish complex predicates as you said and the examples I broughtt about for example go to school and ... – Ahmad Aug 08 '15 at 06:23

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