Verbal [...] Complexes

Since I started studying linguistics in German, I’ve come to understand the concept of the “verbal complex”. Only too well. Boy, can it be complex.

I’ve just read a sentence which had a five word verbal complex. To highlight how complicated this is, I can’t actually come up with one that’s more than three words in English, although I’m pretty sure if I were more awake, I could come up with a four word one. (*wakes up, finds a four word verbal complex*)

“She should not have been being so rude.”

The underlined words are the verbal complex. Notice how there’s a word in the middle, not, which isn’t part of the verbal complex. This is where the sentence I’ve just read broke my poor little brain.

I have to give you some more background here too. The sentence I have just read is not one of the evil examples used by linguists to prove a point. It’s an apparently innocent sentence, in the middle of an apparently normal paragraph of apparently perfectly reasonable prose.

But it has a five-word verbal complex, with the first two words being seperated from the last three by FORTY THREE other words. 43. I counted. Twice. Forty three words stand between reading the first part of the verbal complex, and getting to the end of the verbal complex, so that you can figure out what verb was meant all along. My poor little English-speaking brain can’t cope with that.

There are even two other single-word verbs in those forty three words, in subordinate clauses. So you find a verb, go “Aha!”, and then realise it’s not the verb you wanted after all. Twice. By the time you find the end of the sentence, you’ve gotten most of the content, but you’ve entirely missed what the verb was. And you try reading a few sentences without the verbs. They really don’t make much sense, in general. Certainly not when the verb itself is five words long.

I’m going to go away now, and cry.