What part of a sentence is the phrase "am going", as in "I am going to pray"?
Learn English – Is “am going” a verb phrase
auxiliary-verbsfuturewill-be-going
auxiliary-verbsfuturewill-be-going
What part of a sentence is the phrase "am going", as in "I am going to pray"?
Best Answer
It’s the first person singular of the present tense indicative of the auxiliary verb ‘be’, followed by the ‘-ing’ form of the main verb ‘go’. Together they express progressive aspect, which typically describes an action taking place at the time of speaking. In this example, however, ‘go’ carries no sense of actual movement. The construction is one of the ways in which English, in the absence of a future tense, expresses the future. It indicates the intention to do the action described by the following verb, ‘pray’.
In terms of immediate constituent analysis, ‘I’ is a Noun Phrase and the whole of the rest of the sentence is a Verb Phrase.