Grammar leaflets/FINAL DRAFT Grammar 4 Verbs 05-07-03.rtf
Grammar leaflets/FINAL DRAFT Grammar 4 Verbs 05-07-03.rtf
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Grammar 4 -
'Verbs
To describe the way that the verb is used is very hard. In the leaflet Grammar 1 - Word Classes, there was a short description. Here, we introduce some of the words, and therefore the ideas, connected with the grammar of the way in which verbs are used to communicate meaning in English.
A verb phrase (i.e. one or more words combining to perform the function of a Verb) can show not only tense (see first leaflet), but also aspect, voice and mood. I cannot give a satisfactory short definition. It is better to learn by examining how they are used than by definitions. Seeing how they are used is the best way to learn what they are. (I can reassure the reader that there are only two (or three) aspects, two voices and three (or four) moods in English. That may be a little reassuring.)
In English, the position is more difficult because we communicate many shades of meaning (including voice, aspect and mood) in the verb by using auxiliary and modal verbs. Our 'verb tenses' are more phrases than inflections. You may remember that Word Classes can be divided into those of function and form (see Grammar 1leaflet). Verbs too can be divided in a similar way. The basic use of verbs is to express a meaning (of 'doing or being'). Verbs used in this way are called semantic verbs (sometimes main verbs). The others - the auxiliary and modal verbs - are used less for any clear meaning but for the functions they perform.)
Auxiliary Verbs
'Auxiliary verbs fall into several classes. The first, and most important, in a pattern that English shares with most European languages, are 'to be' and 'to have'. Along with 'to do', these three are known as the primary verbs, so important are they. We can begin our understanding of their uses by considering the features called aspect and voice.
Aspect
The basic auxiliary use of to have (it also has a use as a main - or semantic - verb, ~ 'possess') is to construct verb phrases indicating some form of past tense in the perfect aspect. These are such phrases as 'I have done the shopping', a verb phrase English uses to express the meaning that in other languages may be communicated by an inflected tense called the present perfect; and 'I had done the research before I wrote the essay' (the past perfect). There is also a future perfect, in such phrases as 'I shall have finished my essay by Friday.'
Perfect comes from a Latin word meaning 'finished'; and although its meaning in grammar is much more complicated than this simple fact, it makes it easier for some students to use the word correctly. 'I have made the supper' implies 'and it's ready now', whereas 'I made the supper' - the simple past tense - has the more general meaning of 'some time in the past'. On some occasions, it will mean 'yesterday', or even 'the day before yesterday'. In extreme cases we can even say 'I made the supper last year'; and grandparents might say 'I played football in my youth.' (The last example suggests that the playing of football was something that happened; the related perfect 'I have played football in my youth' suggests more strongly that those days are over, 'I will not play again.' The subtlety of this distinction is an example of why understanding the English verb can be very difficult for non-native learners.)
(One possibly confusing fact is that the form I have done it is called the present' perfect, but its meaning is usually about past' time. This is a reminder of the difference between the ideas of tense' and time'. It may help to consider that the 'perfect', meaning 'it is finished', implies that what is' complete now has been done' in the past.)
To be (the only verb in English with as many as eight different forms) is used, in its auxiliary role, for several functions. (It too has meaning as a main verb.) We use it when constructing verb phrases in the continuous aspect, that is when we say 'I am going' for the present continuous, as opposed to 'I go' (the simple present), or 'I was singing' (the past continuous) as opposed to 'I sang' (the simple past).
In other words, the continuous aspect implies that the tenses called continuous express a feeling of something continuing to happen. There is less sense in the continuous aspects of the 'limits', the start and end, of the action that the verb is describing.
Note: some grammarians and teachers of English call the aspect that I call 'continuous' the progressive aspect. This is best thought of as being an action that is (in the present) or was (in the past) in progress'.
If a verb is clearly neither progressive nor perfect, we call it simple - in the simple aspect. These are the tenses formed by inflection.
One of the oddities of English which can cause non-native learners endless trouble is the difference between the present simple and the present continuous. If we are communicating a future meaning by using a present tense, this is virtually always the present continuous, not the present simple. We say "He is going to town", not "he go to town." This observation may be of some help.
Voice.
A second use of to be as an auxiliary is to show the passive voice. This is the term used to label the use of a verb not to say what the Subject was doing, but 'what was being done to' [the Subject]. This gives examples like 'the window was broken by the ball' (simple past passive), 'that car is being driven by a madmen' (present continuous passive) and 'my assignment will be finished before Saturday' (future simple passive). In all these examples, the logical Object - the person or thing on whom the action of the verb is performed - becomes the grammatical Subject. The logical Subject does not have to be expressed at all; indeed, one use of the passive can be to conceal responsibility. "What happened to the paint?" says the teacher. "It was spilt," says the pupil - who will not say by whom it was spilled (an agentive phrase).
Note that only transitive verbs (see Grammar 1 - Word Classes) have a passive. Intransitive verbs, by definition, do not have an Object - a logical Object. So they have nothing that can be transformed into the Grammatical Subject of a passive verb.
(Verbs that can have both a transitive and an intransitive form can have a Passive - but only for senses in which they are used transitively. That should be obvious - but it may take some concentrated thought from readers who are not used to grammar.)
The passive is formed with the verb to be - the be-passive'. In informal English, it is often replaced by get - the get-passive'. Do not use the get-passive in Academic English writing. (Indeed, avoid the word 'get' as much as possible.)
The other voice that exists in English (in English there are only two) is the active. One way of looking at voice is to think of the two as looking at the same event in opposite directions. "The girl farmed the land" (active) means virtually the same thing as "The land was farmed by the girl" (passive) - but the two ways of saying the same thing have different emphases.
Be careful here: 'the dog bit the man' is the active form; 'the man was bitten by the dog' is its passive equivalent (in both cases, it is the dog's teeth that do the damage). But 'the man bit the dog' is a different sentence altogether. (It indicates a less usual situation.) Check that you can form the passive of this last example.
In the example of the passive voice above, in the pupil's answer to the teacher's question "What happened to the paint?" - "It was spilt" - conceals the guilty person's identity. In the active voice, the guilty pupil would have to say "I spilled the paint" - it is harder to conceal responsibility in the active voice.
The third primary verb, 'to do', is used - apart from where it is used for its meaning as a main verb - mostly in the construction of questions and some similar usages elsewhere, called an 'operator verb'. Sometimes it is used as a 'dummy verb' to repeat a previous verbal idea without using the same word - "She likes chocolate"/ "Oh she does, does she?"
T'o do is also sometimes called a 'pro-verb' because it stands for a verb, as a pronoun stands for a noun. Note that it has to be written with a hyphen to avoid confusion with the word 'proverb' - a folk saying.
'''Mood
is another technical term of grammar. It is not hugely important in English for native speakers, though it can be very helpful to foreign learners, and the concept is of great value to English natives who are learning other languages.
The English verb has three or four moods (grammatically speaking).
1 The imperative is the mood in which we give orders. Characteristically, the imperative has no stated Subject - "Do this!" we say, and we do not have to spell out who it is that we are talking to.
2 The interrogative is the mood with which we ask questions. This is most often shown by alterations in word order. "Is the sun shining?" [aux + Subj + verb] is a question equivalent to the statement "Yes, the sun is shining" [Subject + aux + verb]; "Did John do it?": "John did it."
3 "John did it" and "the sun is shining" are examples of the third, and by far the most common mood - the indicative. This is the form of the verb - the mood, indeed - which we use to indicate the facts about whatever is happening. "The sun is shining," we say [continuous aspect, present tense, active voice, indicative mood], or "Hull City won yesterday" [simple past tense, active voice, indicative mood] or "he was knocked over by the car" [simple past tense, passive voice, indicative mood] or "the child was being taken to school" [continuous past passive indicative].
"She was' ill the other day", note, is the simple past' of the verb 'to be'. In "she was singing", on the other hand, was' is an auxiliary which is used to form the continuous past active of the verb 'to sing'. This is 'to be' being used as an auxiliary to form continuous sentences. In "the referee was' kicked' by a player", the 'was' shows us a passive 'to be' used to make a past passive tense.
These examples show us again that in the study of grammar there are no simple answers that can be learnt by heart. Students have to use their intelligence, judgement and experience to analyse how the words are being used.
Similar care should be taken with the word had'. It can be the simple past of the verb 'to have' in its semantic uses - e.g. "I had' fish and chips for lunch"; "The student had' difficulty with verbs". But it can also be an auxiliary used to form the past perfect tense - e.g. "We had' walked' for some miles before we ate", and "It had' rained' on Friday, but on Saturday the sun shone."
In some languages, there are other moods.
4 English-speaking students can be plagued by the subjunctive in learning European languages. In my judgement, the subjunctive hardly exists in English - though some grammarians label as 'subjunctive' the comparatively rare forms of the verb which are known in EFL ('English as a Foreign Language') teaching as 'the third conditional'.
These are the forms used, in formal English at least, to describe an hypothesis which is actually impossible - the famous example is "If I were'' you." These forms look like a past tense, but they are used - at least in formal English - with different rules. In the indicative and interrogative moods, the form of the verb 'to be' usually used with 'I' - the first person singular of the past tense of 'to be' - is was''. (There is no past imperative.)
In other European languages, the subjunctive tends either to indicate an element of uncertainty, doubt or futurity, for example in an 'if' Clause; or to express certain kinds of dependency of a Subordinate verb.
Modal verbs
Some verbs in English are only really used to communicate shades of meaning - such as tense and obligation.
It often surprises people to realise that English has only two tenses, the present and the past. This is true in the fullest sense of 'tense'; that is, a meaning to do with time expressed by a change in the form of a word, or an inflection.
The future in English is expressed not by an inflection but by a verb phrase. (This is not the same as a phrasal verb - see below.) The future is expressed by a modal verb such as 'shall', 'will' or 'going to'.
(It is evidence of the fact that language is not logical that we very commonly express future meaning by the use of the present tense, usually in the progressive aspect. "What are you doing tonight?"/"Oh, we're going to the cinema"; "They're going to France for their holidays this summer.")
Other modals express ideas of possibility ('can'), obligation ('should', 'must' etc) and possibility ('may', 'could') and so on. Some other examples are: 'dare', 'need', 'ought to', 'had better', 'have to', 'be able to', 'be obliged to', and 'be supposed to'.
There are several different classifications of modal verbs. These have less 'strength' as important features of grammar than the central modals and semi-auxiliaries in the examples above. Constructions like 'seem to', 'get [with the -ed participle]' and 'keep' [with the -ing participle]', etc, can be helpful for foreign learners to learn, and as examples of modality for native learners.
'More verb forms
Most of what has been said so far refers to finite verbs. This means 'verbs whose tense is fixed'. There are also various forms whose tense is not fixed - the non-finite verb forms.
The infinitive
This is the form of the verb usually found in dictionaries. There are two infinitives in English. One, the 'bare infinitive', is the base form, by itself.
(The base form of a verb is the one from which the other forms are adapted. Regular verbs in English have up to five forms: the base form; the 3rd person singular in the present tense, formed by adding -s to the base form, e.g. 'he talks'; the past tense; and the two participles. Some verbs have fewer forms, usually because the past tense and the past participle are identical. One verb has eight forms - the verb 'to be'. It is a useful exercise to list - and label - them.)
The other infinitive consists of 'to' + the base form. This is called - obviously enough - the 'to-infinitive'.
(This is the form, 'to think', which is meant when teachers and others say "You should not ''split the infinitive'' - i.e. don't put anything between 'to' and the verb itself.)
Two non-finite forms of the verb can give difficulty because they are 'dual purpose'. They do two jobs at once.
Participles
The participle is perhaps best thought of, at least in some of its uses, as a verbal adjective - it performs some of the functions of a verb, and some of the functions of an adjective. (The balance between these two changes in different contexts.)
There are two participles in the English verb. The first is variously called the present participle or the active participle. Modern grammar finds it more convenient to call this the -ing participle. This shows clearly how it is formed - by adding the three letters '-ing' to the base form of the verb, e.g. 'to be'  'being', 'to do'  'doing', 'to carry'  'carrying' etc.
The past or passive participle is called, in modern grammar, the -ed participle. There is more variation in the way that this is formed. Most verbs form the -ed participle by adding the two letters 'ed' to the base form of the verb; but there are many exceptions: 'teach'  'taught', 'sell'  'sold' and 'write'  'written'. However this participle is formed in a given verb, the general name for the verb-form is still 'the -ed participle'.
Note that the past participle of 'to write' is 'written'. 'wrote' is the past tense. In most verbs (the regular verbs) the past tense and the past participle have exactly the same form. Both end in -ed. But perhaps the most common of the variations, the irregularities, of the English verb is where the past tense and the past participle have different forms. 'to drink' has past tense 'drank' and past participle 'drunk'; 'to drive'  'drove' [p. t.] and 'driven' [p. p.]; 'to speak'  'spoke', 'spoken' - and so on.
It is not uncommon to find errors in the choice of the past tense form where the past participle is needed, and vice versa. Children learning English as their mother-tongue often make mistakes like 'I have ran' for 'I have run', as well as problems with irregularities like 'We have buyed it' for 'we have bought it', and even adding regularity and irregularity together, as in 'It has been eatened by the cat.'
The -ed (or 'past') participle is used with the auxiliary have (or very rarely to be) to make the past tense. It is used with to be (be-passive) to form passives - hence its other name of the 'passive' participle.
The -ing participle is used with the verb to be (be-progressive) to make the continuous tenses - both present ('he is going') and past ('he was going'). It is sometimes used as an adverbial or adjectival. In "Hurrying down the street, he passed his son coming the other way", "Hurrying down the street" is best seen as an adverbial phrase of time, equivalent to the Adverbial Clause "When he was hurrying down the street..." However, "coming the other way" is an adjectival phrase, equivalent to the Adjectival Clause "who was coming the other way."
Verbal nouns
(These were known as ''gerunds ''in more traditional grammar. The word is more useful in the study of Latin grammar than in the English variety.)
Sometimes verbs in the -ing form can be used in the same way as nouns. (Usually, as we have seen, the -ing form is used in a way close to an adjective.) "Studying makes me hungry," we say. Subjects should be nouns, or noun phrases. In this example, the Subject of the Verb ('makes') is 'studying'. So here, an -ing form is a noun.
In "Crossing the street can be dangerous," the -ing form is also a noun, the Subject of the verb 'can be'. But it is also a verb in its own right, with an Object - 'the street'. We see the same grammatical construction if we adapt the first example to "Studying grammar makes me hungry." This can be shown as
[(Studying (verbal noun) grammar (noun)Od)S makes (verb) me (pn)Od hungry (adj)Ca]
There are many complexities in the uses of verbal nouns. These are interesting to those who study the theory of grammar, but they are too many to cover in a short leaflet.
What is important for people starting to study grammar is to realise that there are such things as words with dual use - that sometimes words have two functions at the same time. For everyday purposes, it is enough to know that there are such things as verbal nouns and participles. They can look alike; they must be distinguished by their function.
