They are responsible for action, being and happening – the very life and movement of the sentence. In this article, I’ll define the verb and explain how different groups of verbs perform distinct actions or carry meanings in language.
Defining Verbs: The Building Blocks of Action
The best way to describe a verb is as a word that indicates an action, state or event. The verb is the essential connector of sentences, supplying crucial information about what is happening, is happening or will happen, and how it relates to whom or what it occurs. It interacts with subjects and objects to complete the thought.
Verbs in Action: Exploring Their Functions
Action Verbs: these are the verbs that ‘do’ something physically or mentally, something like ‘run’, ‘write’ or ‘think’.
Linking verbs Linking verbs connect the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, which describes something about the state being. Examples are, but are not limited to, ‘is’, ‘seem’ and ‘become’.
Auxiliary Verbs (Helping Verbs): They combine with lexical verbs to form verb phrases expressing tense, mood or aspect (eg, have, will, can).
Verbs and Tense: Navigating Time
This is also expressed by verbs, and a way that they do this is by showing the time of an action or event in relation to the current time, something called tense. A sentence like Thus, the tense of the verb alters to ‘were’ as some children are not very bright adds nuance: the event in question no longer seems applicable in the same way to the current time. Tense, then, allows us to be more precise by addressing when things happened. Languages use verb conjugation to do this, changing the form of the verb according to how it relates to the current time.
Verbs and Voice: Expressing Agency
Voice, the fourth axis of verbs, relates to the involvement of the subject in the verb. The two main voices are both active and passive. In the active voice, the doer of the action is emphasised, whereas in the passive voice it is the recipient of the action.
The Power of Verb Choice: Impact on Communication
The judicious choice of a verb makes your communications clearer and more vivid. Precise, powerful verbs paint a vivid image in the reader’s mind and move them emotionally like an action movie, creating powerful impacts. When it comes to writing sticky sentences and speeches, the reason verb choice matters is simple: better verb choices make for better writing.
Verbs in Different Languages: Universality and Diversity
Though most languages have verbs, the way that they are conjugated, how they are used, the shades of meaning conveyed, all of this can vary greatly. Different languages have interesting types of verb structures that reflect human cultural and linguistic diversity.
Conclusion: Verbs as Linguistic Architects
To conclude, verbs are the ultimate making machines in the language shopfront, as all propositional communication is about doing (actions, states and processes), occurring (occurrers), and saying (states of saying). We have access to these processes through classifying and tensing verbs, and we also have positive or negative attitudes towards them through the active or passive voice. As architects of linguistic landscapes, we use verbs to build the worlds of conversation, narratives and discursive practices. They are our most essential tools of language.
Poetic verse or plain scientific prose, verbs are the pulse of form, the measures of a dance between language and thought.
