Excluding some words in string patterns

Question

I'm working on a program that deals with 'part-of-speech tagged' strings such as "I_Pronoun am_Verb a_Determiner human_Noun". What I want to do is replace each verb with Verb+number of syllables of the word, which I can accomplish with this:

StringReplace["Our_Pronoun journey_Noun had_Verb advanced_Verb", {" "~~ 
x___ ~~ "_Verb" .. :> " Verb"<>syllables[x]}]

This works great (it doesn't match verbs at the beginning of the sentence, but surprisingly this is also what I want). Now, I want to make it so it matches all verbs except specific ones. So if I have a list like verbBlacklist={"had","were"} and modify the above code such that everything is the same but 'had' and 'were' are no longer matched.

I have no idea how to do this with string patterns. I've seen Except for characters, is there an equivalent for words?

Answer 1

ClearAll[syllablesF]
syllablesF = # /. DataPaclets`WordDataDump`WordDataHyphenationRules &;
string = "Our_Pronoun were_Verb journey_Noun had_Verb replace_Verb  advanced_Verb";

StringReplace[string, 
 " " ~~ x : (Except["_"] ..) ~~ "_Verb" /; StringFreeQ[x, "had" | "were"] :> 
  " (Verb + " <> ToString[syllablesF[x]] <> ")"]

"Our_Pronoun were_Verb journey_Noun had_Verb (Verb + {re, place}) (Verb + {ad, vanced})"