Is "am going" a verb phrase?

What part of a sentence is the phrase "am going", as in "I am going to pray"?

Solution 1:

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.

Solution 2:

The Berkeley parser says:

The meaning of these tags is here.

"am" is treated as the head-word here, just as it is in "I am green", "I am hungry" or "I am the president". "am going" is not treated as a phrasal unit in English. It could be a phrasal unit in some other language where the concept of "am going" is represented (with morphology) with just one word.

Solution 3:

The present continuous (present progressive) tense is formed by using the auxiliary verb to be in front of the main action verb.

I go -- present simple

I am going -- present continuous