English Grammar 3

Verbs

Verbs are one of the eight parts of speech. We have already covered one of the other parts of speech, nouns, in Lesson 1. Just as with nouns, an accurate definition of a verb would only deal with its grammatical function and it would be overly complicated for our purposes. Instead we will again rely on a simplified, intuitive (albeit somewhat inaccurate) definition and some accurate examples. Our definition is this: A verb is a word that describes an action or a state.

A verb is a word that describes an action or a state.

In the following examples all the verbs appear in bold.

A compound verb is a group of two or more words that functions as a verb. A compound verb always consists of at least one actual verb together with one or more other words that may or may not be verbs.

In this course, for the sake of brevity, we will often use the term verb to include both single-word verbs and compound verbs, even though strictly speaking a verb is one of the eight parts of speech and as such only applies to single words.

Subjects and objects

When used in a sentence a verb almost always has a subject. The verb’s subject is the person or thing that is doing the action represented by the verb.

    John reads.

This simple sentence consists of a verb, “reads”, and a noun, “John”, which is the subject of the verb.

    The white dog is running.

This sentence contains the compound verb “is running”. The verb’s subject is the whole phrase “The white dog”. In general, the subject of a verb can be any noun phrase. A noun phrase is a group of one or more words that functions as a noun (much in the same way that a compound verb functions as a verb). The phrases “John” and “The white dog” are both noun phrases.

In addition to a subject, very often a verb will also have an object. The object of a verb is the person or thing to which the action is being done. Like the subject, the object of a verb can be any noun phrase.

    John feeds his dog.

Here the verb is “feeds”, the subject of the verb is “John” and the object of the verb is the noun phrase “his dog”.

1st, 2nd and 3rd person

Any noun phrase can be said to refer to the 1st person, the 2nd person or the 3rd person. The 1st person is the speaker or writer, referred to using the words ”I”, “we”, “me” and “us”. The 2nd person is the listener or reader, referred to using the word “you”. The 3rd person is any other person or thing.

Here are some examples of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person noun phrases as the subject of a verb.

Here are some examples of 1st, 2nd and 3rd person noun phrases as the object of a verb.

Singular and plural

Any noun or noun phrase can be classified as being either singular or plural. A singular noun phrase refers to a single person or thing and a plural noun phrase refers to two or more people or things.

This singular/plural property of a noun phrase is referred to as its grammatical number, or simply its number. So, we can say that the noun “cat” is singular in number and the noun phrase “two good ideas” is plural in number. Nouns and noun phrases can usually be made plural by adding an ”s” or “es” to the end of the main noun, as can be seen in the first few examples in the previous table.

Person and number of a verb

A verb is often considered to have the same person and number as its subject. This is most relevant when discussing situations in which the form of the verb changes based on the person and number of the subject. Consider, for example, the verb “sleep”.

The verb “sleep” changes to “sleeps” if and only if it has a 3rd person singular subject. In fact the vast majority of English verbs add ”s” or “es” to create the 3rd person singular form.

Inflection

In the previous two sections we observed that singular nouns can usually be made plural by adding an ”s” or “es” to the end, and we observed that most verbs add an ”s” or “es” to the end to form their 3rd person singular form. This process of changing words for grammatical reasons is called inflection. Here are some more examples of inflection, with the inflected words shown in bold.

There are two other terms you may come across that mean the same thing as “inflect”. They are “decline” (when referring to nouns) and “conjugate” (when referring to verbs). So you can decline a noun, you can conjugate a verb and you can inflect either a noun or a verb. All three terms: “inflect”, “decline” and “conjugate”, have the same basic meaning, which is to modify a word to convey grammatical information.

The Infinitive

The most basic, uninflected form of a verb is known as the infinitive. This is the form that is listed in dictionaries. Usually the infinitive is preceded by the word “to” when it is used in a sentence. In this case it is known as the full infinitive, as in the following examples.

When the infinitive is used without the word “to” it is known as the bare infinitive. The bare infinitive is used in the following examples.

The infinitive is used in many different ways - too many to cover in this guide. The one common theme, however, is that the infinitive is used in contexts where extra grammatical information such as person and number are not needed or wanted. The infinitive conveys the pure meaning of a verb without any extra grammatical baggage. For example in the sentence “He starts to run”, the infinitive “to run” is used after the inflected, 3rd person singular verb “starts” because there is no need to duplicate the grammatical information already conveyed by that inflected verb.

When contrasted with the uninflected infinitive, inflected verbs are referred to as finite verbs. It is sometimes difficult to tell whether a particular sentence is using a finite verb or a bare infinitive because for most English verbs these two forms are identical. Consider these examples.

The distinction between the different forms becomes apparent when we use the verb “to be”, because its finite forms are all different from the infinitive.

If you’re ever in doubt about whether the infinitive is being used in a particular situation the easiest way to work it out is to replace the problem verb with the appropriate form of the verb “to be”. If the form you choose is “be” (rather than “am”, “is”, “are”, “was” etc.), then you are using the infinitive.

Verb tenses

Verb tenses are used to convey temporal information about the action represented by a verb. Primarily tenses are used to indicate whether an action takes place in the past, present or future, and to express temporal relationships between different actions. There are a large number of different tenses in English, formed using a combination of inflection and auxilliary verbs. The following table shows examples of the twelve tenses that are used to express simple factual statements in English. There are still more tenses that are used to express more complex ideas.