Key considerations

Learners need to understand various features of verbs in order to construct and choose between appropriate tenses and in order to use other basic sentence constituents (e.g. subject, direct and indirect objects) in the right order. This chapter outlines these features and the chapters in Parts B and C expand this information.

Forming questions and negative statements involves making changes to the form or sentence position of verbs. Learners often have difficulty with this, and may continue making mistakes long after they have understood the ‘rules’.

While all languages have verbs, many make no grammatical distinction between, for example, modal verbs and main verbs, or event verbs and state verbs. Many languages don’t have tenses, or don’t use auxiliary verbs in forming them.

What are verbs?

What do they do?

People often think of verbs as ‘doing words’ or ‘action words’. While many verbs do describe actions (e.g. hit, paint), we also use verbs to express other meanings such as existence (e.g. be, become, exist), mental conditions and processes (e.g. believe, deduce, enjoy), and relationships (e.g. depend, determine).

In terms of meaning, their importance varies considerably. In the first text below, most of the verbs convey important information that couldn’t be guessed if they were left out. Sometimes, however, nouns convey the essential meaning, and the verbs may only ‘support’ them, conveying little information (e.g. I had breakfast) or conveying information which is already clear in the context. Many of the verbs in the second text opposite illustrate this (e.g. make, sauté, add, bring).

What do they look like?

In many languages it is possible to identify at least some verbs from unique features of their spelling and pronunciation. This is not the case in English.

In the following, the verbs have been printed in italics.

Where do they come in sentences?

We normally need to include at least one verb in every sentence. If we compare English with other languages, we can generalise that (as in most European languages) the verb follows the subject and precedes everything else. However, the type of verb we choose and the type of sentence we use it in also affect the order of sentence constituents.