The key word in most sentences, the word that reveals what is happening, is the
verb. It can declare something (
You ran), ask a question (
Did you run?), convey a command (
Run faster!), or express a wish (
May this good weather last!) or a possibility (
If you had run well, you might have won; if you run better tomorrow, you may win). You cannot have a complete English sentence without at least one verb.
Understandably, this multitalented part of speech can be analyzed and categorized in any of several ways. For example, this dictionary distinguishes between a
transitive verb, labeled “(used with object),” as in
The country fought
two wars at the same time, and an
intransitive verb, labeled “(used without object),” as in
He fought
in both of them. As we can see with
fight, some verbs can be either transitive or intransitive.
Another analysis is offered by the grammarians Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik in their renowned
A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. They divide verbs into three categories: (1)
modal auxiliary verbs, a short list comprising
can, may, will, shall, could, might, would, should, and
must, all of which are “helping” verbs, as in
Congress will
vote tomorrow, and (2)
primary verbs, the smallest group—
be, do, and
have—all three of which can be either auxiliaries (
I am
leaving for school now; I did
finish my homework; I have
studied enough) or main verbs (
I am
happy; I did
my best; I have
a good teacher), and (3)
full verbs, the largest group by far, containing all the rest.
A third approach differentiates an
action verb from one that is
stative. An
action verb expresses something you can do (
run, study, sit, want) or something that can happen (
leak, end, appear, collapse). In contrast, a
stative verb expresses an ongoing state or condition (
I know all the answers; we own our house; they fear failure). Some verbs, like
be, are in both camps: In
she is careless, the verb
is is stative, describing a permanent trait. In
she was being careless in losing those documents, the verb
was is an action verb, describing a specific act of carelessness. The same mutability is seen in verbs of the senses (
smell, taste, feel):
Mmm, smell that coffee [action];
the coffee smells wonderful [stative].
We can also distinguish the
linking verb (more formally known as a
copula) from verbs that can take an object or be modified by an adverb. Linking verbs identify or describe a subject by connecting it with a noun, an adjective, or a prepositional phrase in a following
complement (
she is a doctor; they were delighted; we will be at the party). Other linking verbs, like
feel, appear, smell, taste, look, become, and
stay perform the same concatenating function. A number of them happen to be stative, but not all;
get and
act, for example, are both linking and action verbs (
the weather got warmer yesterday; she acted surprised). As we can see, a single verb can be categorized in more than one way, depending on which type of analysis we subject it to.
And finally, we can look at English verbs in terms of a number of grammatical features that are expressed by changes in their form or changes in the way sentences are constructed. These features are
tense2 (such as present and past),
voice (active or passive),
person (first, second, or third),
number (singular or plural), and
mood2 (such as indicative and subjunctive)—each defined at its own
dictionary.com entry.