The Types of Verbs

According to their meaning verbs fall under two groups: notional and functional.

Notional verbs have full lexical meaning of their own. The majority of verbs fall under this group: e.g.: to work, to build, to lie, to love, etc.

Functional verbs differ from notional ones of lacking lexical meaning of their own. They cannot be used independently in the sentence; they are used to furnish certain parts of sentence (very often they are used with predicates).

Functional verbs are subdivided into three: link verbs, modal verbs, auxiliary verbs.

Link verbs connect the nominative part of the predicate (the predicative) with the subject. They can be of two types: pure and specifying link verbs. Pure link verbs perform a purely predicative-linking function in the sentence; in English there is only one pure link verb to be; specifying link verbs specify the connections between the subject and its property, cf.: He was pale. – He grew pale. The specification of the connections may be either “perceptional”, e.g.: to seem, to look, to feel, etc., or “factual”, e.g.: to grow, to become, to get, etc. The functional link verbs should be distinguished from homonymous notional verbs, e.g.: to grow can be a notional verb or a specifying link verb, cf.: The child grew quickly. – He grew pale.

Modal verbs are small group of verbs which usually express the modal meaning, the speaker’s attitude to the action, expressed by the notional verb in the sentence. They lack some grammatical forms like infinitive form, grammatical categories and so on. Thus, they do not have all the categories of verbs. They may express mood and tense since they function as parts of predicates. They lack the non-finite forms.

Besides in present-day English there is another group of verbs which are called auxiliaries. They are used to form analytical forms of verbs. Verbs: to be, to do, to have and so on may be included to this group.

According to the formation of tenses verbs are classified into two groups:

1) Regular verbs which form their basic forms by means of productive suffixes-(e)d. The majority of verbs refer to this class.

2) Irregular verbs form their basic forms by such non-productive means as:

a) variation of sounds in the root:

should - would - initial consonant change

begin - began - begun - vowel change of the root

catch - caught - caught - root - vowel and final consonant change

spend - spent - spent - final consonant change;

b) suppletion (the forms of words derived from different roots):

be – was / were

go – went

c) unchanged forms:

cast - cast - cast

put - put – put

Verbs can also be classified from the point of view of their ability of taking objects. In accord with this we distinguish two types of verbs: transitive and intransitive.

Transitive verbs are subdivided into two:

a) verbs which are combined with direct object: to have a book to find the address

b) verbs which take prepositional objects: to wait for, to look at, talk about, depend on…

Intransitive verbs are subdivided into:

a) verbs expressing state: be, exist, live, sleep, die …

b) verbs of motion: go, come, run, arrive, travel …

c) verbs expressing the position in space: lie, sit, stand...

In many cases we come across an intermediate stratum. We find such stratum between transitive and intransitive verbs which is called causative verbs, verbs intransitive in their origin, but some times used as transitive: to fly a kite, to sail a ship, to nod approval...

On the basis of subject-process relations the verbs are subdivided into actional and statal verbs. The terms are self-explanatory: actional verbs denote the actions performed by the subject as an active doer, e.g.: to go, to make, to build, to look, etc.; statal verbs denote various states of the subject or present the subject as the recipient of an outward activity, e.g.: to love, to be, to worry, to enjoy, to see, etc. Mental and sensual processes can be presented as actional or statal; they can be denoted either by correlated pairs of different verbs, or by the same verbal lexeme, e.g.: to know (mental perception) – to think (mental activity), to see, to hear (physical perception as such) - to look, to listen (physical perceptional activity); The cake tastes nice (taste denotes physical perception, it is used as a statal verb). – I always taste food before adding salt (taste denotes perceptional activity, it is used as an actional verb).

The difference between actional and statal verbs is grammatically manifested in the category of aspect forms: actional verbs take the form of the continuous aspect freely, and statal verbs are normally used in indefinite forms in the same contexts, cf.: What are you looking at? Do you hear me? The use of the continuous aspect forms of the statal verbs finds its explanation in terms of the oppositional theory as a specific case of transposition and involves certain transformations in the meaning of the verb, e.g.: The doctor is seeing a patient right now; I’m not seeing much of her lately (seeing acquires the meaning of activity close to “meeting”); You are being naughty (= “behaving”).

Another subdivision of notional verbs is based on their aspective meaning: subdivision of all the verbs into two big groups: the so-called limitive verbs and unlimitive verbs.

Limitive verbs present a process as potentially limited, directed towards reaching a certain border point, beyond which the process denoted by the verb is stopped or ceases to exist, e.g.: to come, to sit down, to bring, to drop, etc.

Unlimitive verbs present the process as potentially not limited by any border point, e.g.: to go, to sit, to carry, to exist, etc.

Some limitive and unlimitive verbs form semantically opposed pairs, denoting roughly the same actual process presented as either potentially limited or unlimited, cf.: to come – to go, to sit down – to sit, to bring – to carry; other verbs have no aspective counterparts, e.g.: to be, to exist (unlimitive), to drop (limitive). But the bulk of English verbs can present the action as either limitive or unlimitive in different contexts, e.g.: to build, to walk, to turn, to laugh, etc. Traditionally such verbs are treated as verbs of double, or mixed aspective nature. In terms of the theory of oppositions one can say that the lexical opposition between limitive and unlimitive verbs is easily neutralized; this makes the borderline between the two aspective groups of verbs rather loose, e.g.: Don’t laugh – this is a serious matter (unlimitive use, basic function of the verb laugh); He laughed and left the room (limitive use, neutralization). The aspective subdivision of the verbs is closely connected with the previously described subdivision of the verbs into actional and statal (limitive verbs can be only actional, while unlimitive verbs can denote both actions and states) and it is also grammatically relevant for the expression of the grammatical category of aspect.

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