Verbs
When we were little
children, our teachers taught us that
verbs were action words.
It never occurred to us to ask where the action word was in the
sentence: I
am a student. Our teachers had also taught us that there
could be no
sentence without a verb. This too was a simplification
...another half-truth!
Our
teachers simplified matters for a purpose. They wanted to make our
young minds understand just the basics of English grammar...for we were
too young to ask deeper questions in those days. Our language stomachs
could only digest the milk of English grammar.
I think, you, as a smart
young adult, trying to learn on your own, will surely want
more
solid food than "milk." But I advise
you, to chew very slowly, masticate it well and only then swallow
this particular dish of verbs, morsel by
morsel!
| If you are curious about the full truth concerning the
"half-truths" mentioned above...One fact is that just any verb will not
suffice in a sentence. You need a "finite" one. The other is that
action words are not the only words that belong to the part of speech
we are talking about. |
What
is a Verb?
It is one of the parts
of speech. It is a word which expresses any one
of the
following concepts: doing,
being or having.
You may think of it as belonging to one of these three families:
- The first
one, which is the house of doing,
is a large family. All action
words live in this house. The head of the family
is known by the name 'to
do.'
The other members are these: to eat, to drink, to work, to
sleep,
to read, to play, to help, to open, to shut, to write, and all
other words which imply action.
Now some of the members of this family are considered regular and the
others irregular.
They are sometimes also called weak and strong.
- The second house is the house of being.
It is dominated by 'to
be.'
In fact, the poor word doesn't dominate at all. It
does a
lot of work, but more often that not, its work goes
unnoticed.
For instance, when people see the words 'is singing,' they pay
attention to the word
'singing' and ignore the 'is.'
'To be' has eight different
forms: am,
is, are, was, were, be, being, and been. These forms
are
like uniforms--i.e. different kinds of clothes it wears on different
occasions.
Other minor
characters, such as, become,
seem, appear,
live in the house of being.
They don't express action, but behave like
action words in their forms (i.e. in their appearance).
- The third
is the house of having. 'To have'
is the lone resident here. It describes the act or state of possessing,
besides the many other useful jobs it does.
One such important job is
to show the state of completion of an
action. This is the area of perfect
tenses which we will see when we learn about tenses. 'To have' puts
on four different type of costumes: has, have, had, and having.
Things to Learn About Verbs
Six different things can work on these words and influence their forms
and functions (work).
They are: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person,
and number.
We can learn about them in these topics.
|
