Verb
Encyclopedia
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word
(part of speech) that in syntax
conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English
, the basic form, with or without the particle
to, is the infinitive
. In many language
s, verbs are inflected
(modified in form) to encode tense
, aspect
, mood
and voice
. A verb may also agree with the person
, gender
, and/or number
of some of its arguments, such as its subject
, or object
.
Latin
and the Romance languages
inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood and they agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish
) with the subject. Japanese
, like many languages with SOV word order, inflects verbs for tense/mood/aspect as well as other categories such as negation, but shows absolutely no agreement with the subject - it is a strictly dependent-marking language
. On the other hand, Basque
, Georgian
, and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement
: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object and even the secondary object if present, a greater degree of head-marking
than is found in most European
languages.
Weather verbs are often impersonal
(subjectless, or avalent) in null-subject languages like Spanish
, where the verb llueve means "It rains". In English, they require a dummy pronoun
, and therefore formally have a valency of 1.
Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs
are somewhat different from the norm. In the objective the verb takes an object but no subject; the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to that used with the English weather verbs. Impersonal verbs in null subject languages take neither subject nor object, as is true of other verbs, but again the verb may show incorporated dummy pronouns despite the lack of subject and object phrases. Tlingit
lacks a ditransitive, so the indirect object is described by a separate, extraposed clause.
English verbs are often flexible with regard to valency. A transitive verb can often drop its object and become intransitive; or an intransitive verb can take an object and become transitive. For example, the verb move has no grammatical object in he moves (though in this case, the subject itself may be an implied object, also expressible explicitly as in he moves himself); but in he moves the car, the subject and object are distinct and the verb has a different valency.
In many languages other than English, such valency changes are not possible; the verb must instead be inflected in order to change the valency.
s or inflection
s to convey whether the action or state is before, simultaneous with, or after some reference point. The reference point could be the time of utterance, in which case the verb expresses absolute tense, or it could be a past, present, or future time of reference previously established in the sentence, in which case the verb expresses relative tense.
Aspect expresses how the action or state occurs through time. Important examples include:
Aspect can either be lexical, in which case the aspect is embedded in the verb's meaning (as in "the sun shines", where "shines" is lexically stative); or it can be grammatically expressed, as in "I am running".
Modality expresses the speaker's attitude toward the action or state given by the verb, especially with regard to degree of necessity, obligation, or permission ("You must go", "You should go", "You may go"), determination or willingness ("I will do this no matter what"), degree of probability ("It must be raining by now", "It may be raining", "It might be raining"), or ability ("I can speak French"). All languages can express modality with adverb
s, but some also use verbal forms as in the given examples. If the verbal expression of modality involves the use of an auxiliary verb, that auxiliary is called a modal verb
. If the verbal expression of modality involves inflection, we have the special case of mood
; moods include the indicative (as in "I am there"), the subjunctive
(as in "I wish I were there"), and the imperative
("Be there!").
of a verb expresses whether the subject of the verb is performing the action of the verb or whether the action is being performed on the subject. The two most common voices are the active voice
(as in "I saw the car") and the passive voice
(as in "The car was seen by me" or simply "The car was seen").
Most languages have a number of verbal noun
s that describe the action of the verb.
In the Indo-European languages, verbal adjectives are generally called participle
s. English has an active
participle, also called a present participle; and a passive
participle, also called a past participle. The active participle of break is breaking, and the passive participle is broken.
Other languages have attributive verb
forms with tense and aspect. This is especially common among verb-final languages, where attributive verb phrases act as relative clause
s.
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
(part of speech) that in syntax
Syntax
In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, the basic form, with or without the particle
Grammatical particle
In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition...
to, is the infinitive
Infinitive
In grammar, infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual description of English, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives...
. In many language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s, verbs are inflected
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
(modified in form) to encode tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
, aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
, mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
and voice
Voice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments . When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice...
. A verb may also agree with the person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
, and/or number
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
of some of its arguments, such as its subject
Subject (grammar)
The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
, or object
Object (grammar)
An object in grammar is part of a sentence, and often part of the predicate. It denotes somebody or something involved in the subject's "performance" of the verb. Basically, it is what or whom the verb is acting upon...
.
Agreement
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number and/or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreement only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which is marked by adding "-s" (I walk, he walks) or "-es" (he fishes). The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb (I walk, you walk, they walk, etc.).Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
and the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood and they agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
) with the subject. Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, like many languages with SOV word order, inflects verbs for tense/mood/aspect as well as other categories such as negation, but shows absolutely no agreement with the subject - it is a strictly dependent-marking language
Dependent-marking language
A dependent-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the dependents or modifiers, rather than the heads of the phrase in question. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
. On the other hand, Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
, Georgian
Georgian language
Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...
, and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement
Polypersonal agreement
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments...
: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object and even the secondary object if present, a greater degree of head-marking
Head-marking language
A head-marking language is one where the grammatical marks showing relations between different constituents of a phrase tend to be placed on the heads of the phrase in question, rather than the modifiers or dependents. In a noun phrase, the head is the main noun and the dependents are the...
than is found in most European
Standard Average European
Standard Average European is a concept introduced by Benjamin Whorf to group the modern, Indo-European languages of Europe in the sense of a Sprachbund.The more central members of the SAE Sprachbund are Romance and West Germanic, i.e...
languages.
Valency
The number of arguments that a verb takes is called its valency or valence. Verbs can be classified according to their valency:- Avalent (valency = 0): the verb has neither a subject nor an object. Zero valency does not occur in English; in some languages such as Mandarin Chinese, weather verbs like snow(s) take no subject or object.
- IntransitiveIntransitive verbIn grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
(valency = 1, monovalent): the verb only has a subjectSubject (grammar)The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
. For example: "he runs", "it falls". - TransitiveTransitive verbIn syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
(valency = 2, divalent): the verb has a subject and a direct object. For example: "she eats fish", "we hunt nothing". - DitransitiveDitransitive verbIn grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a recipient and a theme. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be called direct and indirect, or primary and secondary...
(valency = 3, trivalent): the verb has a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object. For example: "He gives her a flower."
Weather verbs are often impersonal
Impersonal verb
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is a verb that cannot take a true subject, because it does not represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing...
(subjectless, or avalent) in null-subject languages like Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, where the verb llueve means "It rains". In English, they require a dummy pronoun
Dummy pronoun
A dummy pronoun is a type of pronoun used in non-pro-drop languages, such as English....
, and therefore formally have a valency of 1.
Intransitive and transitive verbs are the most common, but the impersonal and objective verbs
Impersonal verb
In linguistics, an impersonal verb is a verb that cannot take a true subject, because it does not represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing...
are somewhat different from the norm. In the objective the verb takes an object but no subject; the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to that used with the English weather verbs. Impersonal verbs in null subject languages take neither subject nor object, as is true of other verbs, but again the verb may show incorporated dummy pronouns despite the lack of subject and object phrases. Tlingit
Tlingit language
The Tlingit language ) is spoken by the Tlingit people of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada. It is a branch of the Na-Dené language family. Tlingit is very endangered, with fewer than 140 native speakers still living, all of whom are bilingual or near-bilingual in English...
lacks a ditransitive, so the indirect object is described by a separate, extraposed clause.
English verbs are often flexible with regard to valency. A transitive verb can often drop its object and become intransitive; or an intransitive verb can take an object and become transitive. For example, the verb move has no grammatical object in he moves (though in this case, the subject itself may be an implied object, also expressible explicitly as in he moves himself); but in he moves the car, the subject and object are distinct and the verb has a different valency.
In many languages other than English, such valency changes are not possible; the verb must instead be inflected in order to change the valency.
Tense, aspect, and modality
Depending on the language, verbs may express grammatical tense, aspect, or modality. Grammatical tense is the use of auxiliary verbAuxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
s or inflection
Inflection
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...
s to convey whether the action or state is before, simultaneous with, or after some reference point. The reference point could be the time of utterance, in which case the verb expresses absolute tense, or it could be a past, present, or future time of reference previously established in the sentence, in which case the verb expresses relative tense.
Aspect expresses how the action or state occurs through time. Important examples include:
- perfective aspectPerfective aspectThe perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
, in which the action is viewed in its entirety though completion (as in "I saw the car") - imperfective aspectImperfective aspectThe imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...
, in which the action is viewed as ongoing; in some languages a verb could express imperfective aspect more narrowly as:
-
-
- habitual aspect, in which the action occurs repeatedly (as in "I used to go there every day"), or
- continuous aspect, in which the action occurs without pause; continuous aspect can be further subdivided into
-
- stative aspectStative verbA stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...
, in which the situation is a fixed, unevolving state (as in "I know French"), and - progressive aspect, in which the situation continuously evolves (as in "I am running")
- perfect, which combines elements of both aspect and tense, and in which both a prior event and the state resulting from it are expressed (as in "I have studied well")
- stative aspect
-
Aspect can either be lexical, in which case the aspect is embedded in the verb's meaning (as in "the sun shines", where "shines" is lexically stative); or it can be grammatically expressed, as in "I am running".
Modality expresses the speaker's attitude toward the action or state given by the verb, especially with regard to degree of necessity, obligation, or permission ("You must go", "You should go", "You may go"), determination or willingness ("I will do this no matter what"), degree of probability ("It must be raining by now", "It may be raining", "It might be raining"), or ability ("I can speak French"). All languages can express modality with adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
s, but some also use verbal forms as in the given examples. If the verbal expression of modality involves the use of an auxiliary verb, that auxiliary is called a modal verb
Modal verb
A modal verb is a type of auxiliary verb that is used to indicate modality -- that is, likelihood, ability, permission, and obligation...
. If the verbal expression of modality involves inflection, we have the special case of mood
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
; moods include the indicative (as in "I am there"), the subjunctive
Subjunctive mood
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....
(as in "I wish I were there"), and the imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
("Be there!").
Voice
The voiceVoice (grammar)
In grammar, the voice of a verb describes the relationship between the action that the verb expresses and the participants identified by its arguments . When the subject is the agent or doer of the action, the verb is in the active voice...
of a verb expresses whether the subject of the verb is performing the action of the verb or whether the action is being performed on the subject. The two most common voices are the active voice
Active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages....
(as in "I saw the car") and the passive voice
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
(as in "The car was seen by me" or simply "The car was seen").
Most languages have a number of verbal noun
Verbal noun
In linguistics, the verbal noun turns a verb into a noun and corresponds to the infinitive in English language usage. In English the infinitive form of the verb is formed when preceded by to, e.g...
s that describe the action of the verb.
In the Indo-European languages, verbal adjectives are generally called participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s. English has an active
Active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages....
participle, also called a present participle; and a passive
Passive voice
Passive voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. Passive is used in a clause whose subject expresses the theme or patient of the main verb. That is, the subject undergoes an action or has its state changed. A sentence whose theme is marked as grammatical subject is...
participle, also called a past participle. The active participle of break is breaking, and the passive participle is broken.
Other languages have attributive verb
Attributive verb
In grammar, an attributive verb is a verb which modifies a noun as an attributive, rather than expressing an independent idea as a predicate....
forms with tense and aspect. This is especially common among verb-final languages, where attributive verb phrases act as relative clause
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
s.
Verbs in various languages
- Ancient Greek verbsAncient Greek verbsAncient Greek verbs have four moods , three voices , as well as three persons and three numbers...
- Basque verbsBasque verbsThe verb is one of the most complex parts of Basque grammar. It is sometimes represented as a difficult challenge for learners of the language, and many Basque grammars devote most of their pages to lists or tables of verb paradigms...
- Bulgarian verbsBulgarian verbsBulgarian verbs are the most complicated part of Bulgarian grammar, especially when compared to other Slavic languages. They are inflected for person, number and sometimes gender. They also have lexical aspect , voice, nine tenses, three moods,These are the indicative, the imperative and the...
- Chinese verbsChinese verbsThere are two different forms of verbs in the Chinese language: the stative, indicating state, and the dynamic, indicating action. The sentence changes with the different forms of verbs.-Verb construction:...
- English verbsEnglish verbsVerbs in the English language are a part of speech and typically describe an action, an event, or a state.While English has many irregular verbs , for the regular ones the conjugation rules are quite straightforward...
- Finnish verb conjugationFinnish verb conjugationVerbs in the Finnish language are usually divided into six main groups when teaching the language to non-native speakers depending on the stem type. All six types have the same set of endings, but the stems undergo different changes when inflected....
- French verbsFrench verbsFrench verbs are a part of speech in French grammar. Each verb lexeme has a collection of finite and non-finite forms in its conjugation scheme....
- German verbsGerman verbsGerman verbs may be classified as either weak, with a dental consonant inflection, or strong, showing a vowel gradation . Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise. The only completely irregular verb in the language is...
- Germanic verbGermanic verbThe Germanic language family is one of the language groups that resulted from the breakup of Proto-Indo-European . It in turn divided into North, West and East Germanic groups, and ultimately produced a large group of mediaeval and modern languages, most importantly: Danish, Norwegian, and...
s - Hebrew verb conjugationHebrew verb conjugationIn Modern Hebrew, verbs are conjugated to reflect their tense and mood, as well as to agree with their subjects in gender, number, and person. Each verb has an inherent voice, though a verb in one voice typically has counterparts in other voices...
- Hungarian verbs
- Ilokano verbIlokano verbAlthough other word classes in Ilokano are not as morphologically diverse in forms, verbs are about as morphologically complex as the classic Indo-European languages of Latin, Ancient Greek or Sanskrit....
s - Irish verbsIrish verbsIrish verb forms are constructed either synthetically or analytically.Synthetic forms express the information about person and number in the ending: e.g., "I praise", where the ending -aim stands for "1st person singular present"...
- Italian verbsItalian verbsItalian verbs have a high degree of inflection, the majority of which follow one of three common patterns of conjugation. Conjugation is affected by mood, person, tense, number and occasionally gender....
- Japanese consonant and vowel verbsJapanese consonant and vowel verbsJapanese has two types of regular verb,#consonant-stem, , Group I, or u verbs, and#vowel-stem, , Group II, or ru verbs.All vowel-stem verbs end in either -eru or -iru...
- Japanese verb conjugations
- Korean verbsKorean verbsVerbs in the Korean language come in last place in a clause. Verbs are the most complex part of speech, and a properly conjugated verb may stand on its own as a complete sentence.- Classification :...
- Latin verbs
- Persian verbsPersian verbsThe infinitive form of the verb is constructed by adding the suffix æn to the past root of the verb. Ex: Khærid+æn= to buyNormal Persian verbs can be formed using the following morpheme pattern:...
- Portuguese verb conjugationPortuguese verb conjugationPortuguese verbs display a high degree of inflection. A typical regular verb has over fifty different forms, expressing up to six different grammatical tenses and three moods...
- Proto-Indo-European verbProto-Indo-European verbThe verbal system of the Proto-Indo-European language was a complex system, with verbs categorized according to their aspect — stative, imperfective, or perfective. The system utilized multiple grammatical moods and voices, with verbs being conjugated according to person, number and tense...
- Romance verbsRomance verbsRomance verbs refers to the verbs of the Romance languages. In the transition from Latin to the Romance languages, verbs went through many phonetic, syntactic, and semantic changes. Most of the distinctions present in classical Latin continued to be made, but synthetic forms were often replaced...
- Romanian verbsRomanian verbsThis article on Romanian verbs is related to the Romanian grammar and belongs to a series of articles on the Romanian language.Unlike English but similar to other Indo-European languages, verbs in Romanian are highly inflective. They conjugate according to mood, tense, voice, person and number....
- Sanskrit verbsSanskrit verbsThe Sanskrit verbal system is very complex, with verbs inflecting for different combinations of tense, aspect, mood, number, and person. Participial forms are also extensively used.-Classification of verbs:...
- Sesotho verbsSesotho verbsSesotho verbs are words in the language which signify the action or state of a substantive, and are brought into agreement with it using the subjectival concord...
- Slovene verbs
- Spanish verbsSpanish verbsSpanish verbs are one of the most complex areas of Spanish grammar. Spanish is a relatively synthetic language with a moderate-to-high degree of inflection, which shows up mostly in the verb conjugation....
- Tigrinya verbsTigrinya verbsIn order to view the Tigrinya characters in this article, you will need a Unicode Ge'ez font, such as [ftp://ftp.ethiopic.org/pub/fonts/TrueType/gfzemenu.ttf GF Zemen Unicode]....
Grammar
- Auxiliary verbAuxiliary verbIn linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
- GrammarGrammarIn linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...
- Grammatical aspectGrammatical aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
- Grammatical moodGrammatical moodIn linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
- Grammatical tenseGrammatical tenseA tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
- Grammatical voice
- Performative utterancePerformative utteranceThe notion of performative utterances was introduced by language philosopher J. L. Austin. According to his original conception, it is a sentence which does something in the world rather than describing something about it...
- Phrasal verbPhrasal verbA phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and a preposition, a verb and an adverb, or a verb with both an adverb and a preposition, any of which are part of the syntax of the sentence, and so are a complete semantic unit. Sentences may contain direct and indirect objects in addition to the phrasal...
- Phrase structure rulesPhrase structure rulesPhrase-structure rules are a way to describe a given language's syntax. They are used to break down a natural language sentence into its constituent parts namely phrasal categories and lexical categories...
- Sentence (linguistics)Sentence (linguistics)In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, and often defined to indicate a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that generally bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it...
- SyntaxSyntaxIn linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....
- Tense–aspect–mood
- Transitivity (grammatical category)Transitivity (grammatical category)In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
- Verb argumentVerb argumentIn linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
- Verb framingVerb framingIn linguistics, verb-framing and satellite-framing are typological descriptions of how verb phrases in different languages describe the path of motion or the manner of motion, respectively....
- Verbification
- Verb phraseVerb phraseIn linguistics, a verb phrase or VP is a syntactic unit composed of at least one verb and the dependents of that verb. One can distinguish between two types of VPs, finite VPs and non-finite VPs . While phrase structure grammars acknowledge both, dependency grammars reject the existence of a...
Other
- Le Train de Nulle PartLe Train de Nulle PartLe Train de Nulle Part is a 2004 French novel by French author Michel Dansel, though the book is authored under the pen name Michel Thaler. An example of constrained writing, the novel is written without a single verb.In the novel's preface, Thaler called the verb an "invader, dictator, usurper of...
: A 233-page book without a single verb. - Oh, with the verbing!Oh, with the verbing!Oh, with the verbing! is a phrase commonly used in TV shows and movies first used by comedian Jerry Lewis. The literal phrase "Oh, with the verbing!" itself is normally used with a verb replacing "verbing," such as "screaming, stabbing, bleeding," hence the name of the phrase...
External links
- conjugation.com English Verb Conjugation.
- Italian Verbs Coniugator and Analyzer Conjugation and Analysis of Regular and Irregular Verbs, and also of Neologisms, like googlare for to google.
- El verbo en español Downloadable handbook to learn the Spanish verb paradigm in an easy ruled-based method. It also supplies the guidelines to know whenever a Spanish verb is regular or irregular