The present paper is concerned with the role and status of the verb in the semantic structure of English scientific-technical text in the field of civil engineering. This is revealed by determining the types of relationships between semantic subclasses of key nouns and verbal paradigmatic classes. The focus is on most significant main and secondary key words of the text selected on the basis of quantitative criterion taking into account the absolute frequency of the of the word usage in the text and the number of passages in which the word occurs. Linear verbal-nominal combinations were built in order to study the dynamics of the main content of the text and principles of its development. The verbal-nominal pairs were analyzed on three levels of analysis: 1) level of lexis and semantics; 2) level of lexis and grammar; 3) level of object-process coordinates. Each type of these combinations reveals one aspect of the text dynamics but all of them taken together reflect the overall picture of the development of the text content from beginning to end via a medial part. The study results shed light on the regularities of the semantic structure of the text, in particular the function of the verb in the formation of verbal-nominal combinations describing the main content of the text. In addition, observations and conclusions can be used in giving a course of lectures on the semantics of the verb and text linguistics. In the light of ELT, outcomes can be applied for the development of efficient learning strategies for vocabulary acquisition based on key words and lexical chunks.