What's a verbal you ask? Well, to misquote Shakespeare, it's a verb by any other part of speech. Verb-like, verb-lookin' words, used as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs. AKA gerunds, participles, and infinitives. Trolling the recesses of my high school experience, I vaguely recall the first two (honestly, I think I learned participle form in German, not English) and the final one not at all. Thank goodness my college best friend, who lives 10 minutes away, was an English major and has taught this craziness.
Verbals get a nifty little bit of diagraming, on the ole sentence skeleton diagram. A slightly lopsided pedestal type thing in the simple subject position, that looks more or less like a headless hang man doing a jumping jack.
I think I like my darling daughter's interpretive take them better though. After all, it would never do to confuse verbals with furballs.
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