The verb. General characteristics

1. The Verb. General overview.
2. The categories of person and number.
3. The category of tense.
• The problem of time and tense correlation in the language system. Absolute and relative use of tense forms.
• Different interpretations of the tense system in English.

1. The verb. General overview

The verb seems to be an area of grammar that has always gained the greatest interest in language learning. We can say with little fear of exaggeration that in most developed modern languages the verb is indeed the most intricate single mechanism, the keystone of the architecture of human communication.

In Modern English as well as in many other modern languages, verbal forms imply not only subtle shades of time distinction but serve other purposes, too; they are also often marked for person and number, for mood, voice and aspect.

As a part of speech the verb is characterized by a number of properties.

1. The exact definition of the verb as a word class may give grounds for dispute.

According to Aristotle the verb signifies actions and passions. According to Scaliger the verb signifies what is passing as opposed to the noun that signifies what is permanent. J.C. Nesfiled (1898) defined the verb “as a word used for saying something about some person or thing” making little difference between a verb and an adjective. Some grammars prefer to talk about “doing words” or “action words”, but this seems to exclude many state verbs (e.g. know, remember, be, etc.). Thus the lexico-grammatical meaning of the verb in modern terms is that of action, process or state.

1. Its grammatical categories are person, number, tense, aspect, retrospective coordination, mood, and voice. The grammatical categories of the English verb find their expression in synthetic and analytical forms. The formative elements expressing these categories are grammatical affixes, inner inflexion and function words. Some categories have only synthetic forms (person, number), others – only analytical (voice distinctions, retrospective coordination). There are also categories expressed by both synthetic and analytical forms (mood, time, aspect). We generally distinguish finite and non-finite forms of the verb. Non-finites, or the so-called verbids, are the infinitive, the gerund and the participle.
2. The characteristic combinability of the verb is closely linked with its lexico-grammatical meaning. Denoting an action, the verb is naturally associated:

ü with nouns indicating (1) the doer or

(2) the recipient

ü with adverbs (1) to modify the verb.

1. Its syntactic function is a predicate for finites and various other functions for non-finites.

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