The Fundamentals of Verbs

Posted: October 23, 2012

[caption id="attachment_10940" align="alignright" width="424"]© karuka - Fotolia.com[/caption]You can't write without them. They can describe action, an occurrence or a state of being. Yet there are so many types and rules that it can be tough to master the use of the verb. Learn the basic principles of verbs and how to use the different types at the right time.

This post outlines the basic principles of the verb, the workhorse of language.

A verb describes an action (talk), an occurrence (become), or a state of being (live). Verbs are complicated by their many variable states, based on inflection depending on functions. For example, an action might, depending on the number of talkers, be described with the word talk or the word talks. (This quality is called agreement.)

Based on the tense of the sentence, the verb, accompanied by an auxiliary, or helper, could appear in the phrases “will talk,” “has talked,” or “was talking.” (Tense is one of several similar qualities; the others are aspect, how the action or state occurs through time, and modality, the expression of the speaker’s attitude toward the action or state.)

Other qualities of verbs are the voice (such as active voice, as in the form of the verb saw in “Many saw it as a turning point,” or passive voice, as exemplified by the syntax in “It was seen by many as a turning point”) and the valency — whether the verb is intransitive (accompanied by a subject alone, as in “It moves”), transitive (accompanied by a subject and a direct object, as in “We went to the store”), or ditransitive (accompanied by a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object (“I brought him the report”).

The six types of verb follow...

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