Verbs

Verbs constitute a very large words category (a.k.a. part of speech) containing thousands of the most straightfoward ways of talking about voluntary or involuntary actions (Announce, Educate, Shiver, …) or relations (Admire, Dislike, Precede, …). There is a tiny but extremely important subcategory called the auxiliary verbs (the commonest ones are Be, Can, Do, Have, May, Must, Ought, Shall, and Will).

Intro

• Not just actions: seems, contain, have, justify, languish. These refer to being in a certain states

• Nearly all verbs have basic form, in CGEL it’s called plain form

Tense

• Employed to show how an event or state is located in time

• Present: current moment, or timeless

People always say that

• Past: to locate events or states in the past, or an unreal hypothetical world, and sometimes politely

If I investigated further, would I find out anything bad? I wondered if I could possibly borrow your book

Classifications

Functional

Valency is the functional classification.

• Transitivity: intransitive, mono-transitive, ditransitive , complex-transitive

• Copular

Stative vs. Dynamic

• Stative: describe a state that is continuous over time (know, believe, love)

• Dynamic: activities, achievements, accomplishments. The key differentiator is the stopping point.