1:21
According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
here's the 25 most commonly used verbs in English.
The editors of this dictionary offer these observations.
Strikingly, the 25 most frequent verbs are all one syllable words.
The first two syllable verbs are become, that's the 26th word, and
include, the 27th.
2:07
When we talk about the different kinds of verbs, it generally makes
most sense to defined them by what they do rather than by what they are.
Just as the same word measure or increase, for example, can serve as either a noun or
a verb, the same verb can play a number of different roles depending on the context.
There are three basic types of verbs in the English language, lexical verbs,
finite verbs, auxiliary, and modal verbs.
Lexical verbs can stand alone.
Lexical verbs have meanings denoting actions, events, and states.
Auxiliary verbs, such as be, do, have add extra information to the lexical verb.
For example, auxiliary be is used to Indicate continuous or
progressive aspect and passive voice.
Auxiliary do is used in the creation of interrogative,
negative, and emphatic structures.
Auxiliary have is used to indicate perfect aspect.
Auxiliary verbs are usually followed by a lexical verb as in the previous examples.
3:18
Core members of modal verbs are can, could, may, might, shall,
should, will, would, and must.
Modal verbs generally encode meanings connected with degrees of certainty and
degrees of necessity.
3:33
A finite verb or a lexical verb is a form of a verb that has a subject and
can function as the base of an independent clause,
which stands alone as a complete sentence.
In many languages finite verbs serve to present grammatical information of person,
number, tense, aspect, mood, and/or voice.
Broadly speaking, finite verb is the verb in a sentence that shows the tense.
Finite verbs have the following grammatical categories,
person, first, second, or third.
For example, I/we, you, second person, he/she/it/they, third person.
Number, for example, they can be singular or plural or dual, tense, for
example, present, past, and future, aspect, simple, perfect, continuous, mood,
indicative, subjunctive, or imperative, and voice, active or passive.
Finite verbs are distinguished from nonfinite verbs such as infinitives,
participles, and gerunds do not indicate person, number, or tense.
The distinction between finite and nonfinite verbs is a very important
one in grammar since it affects how verbs behave in sentences.
And this table shows basic examples for finite and nonfinite verbs.
A non-finite verb is any of several verb forms that are not finite verbs.
That is, they cannot serve as the base of an independent sentence.
Because English, to a large extent, lacks inflectional morphology,
the finite and nonfinite forms of a verb might appear the same in a given context.
In such a case, the environment surrounding the verb must be
examined to determine whether it is finite or nonfinite.
Sentences 2 and 4 each contain one finite verb.
They're underlined, and nonfinite verbs, participle studying, and
infinitive to approach.
In greater detail, we'll speak about nonfinite verbs later in this module.
6:02
The terms agent, goal, and
recipient describe the function of a word in a sentence.
Most action verbs are transitive and have both an agent and
a goal, although the agent is often omitted in the passive voice.
Very few verbs are truly intransitive, meaning they have no goal and
cannot be followed by a direct object.
Many intransitive verbs also have a transitive form or are used with
a prepositional phrase or adverb that could be considered as indirect object.
6:36
The temperature increased.
The verb is intransitive.
This conclusion requires additional consideration.
The verb is transitive because it has an object.
We listened to the interviews, required prepositional phrase, to the interviews.
Let's consider more example.
The experiment started.
The verb is intransitive, it doesn't take an object.
We started the experiment.
In this case the verb is transitive because we started the experiment,
experiment is the object.
7:08
There is a difference in meaning between these sentences.
When the verb started is intransitive, we started the experiment,
there is a human agent that causes the experiment, the goal to start.
The experiment appears to start by itself when the verb is intransitive.
The experiment started.
Using a non-human agent can be very useful if you write in a discipline
that discourages the use of personal pronouns our and we.
Elena BazanovaDirector of the Language Training and Testing Center
