What is a verb ?
Verbs are words that describe actions, whether physical or mental. Verbs also describe a “state of being,” like the verbs be, become, or exist.
Example: Ronaldo ran across the field, kicked the ball, and scored a goal.
“I am the State.” —King Louis XIV.
Some verbs also act as “helper verbs” to change the tense of another verb. Likewise, these helper verbs can change a positive statement to a negative one with words like “not.”
Example: She has been jogging for a month and already feels her stamina increasing.
Types of verbs:
Action verbs:
Most verbs describe a physical action or activity, something external that can be seen or heard. These verbs are formally known as dynamic verbs, but can also be called action or event verbs.
Example: walk, laugh, swim, play, eat, drink, sing, dance, talk , say.
Stative verbs:
The opposite of dynamic verbs of action is stative verbs of being. Stative verbs describe a subject’s state or feeling, including things they like and don’t like.
Examples: want, need, prefer, love, hate, like, dislike, seem, understand, know, believe, involve, realize.
Auxiliary verbs:
Auxiliary verbs, or “helping verbs,” are used in English to change another verb’s tense, voice, or mood. When auxiliary verbs are used, there’s always a main verb that represents the main action. The main auxiliary verbs are be, have, and do.
Example: I have eaten sushi many times before. (tense)
That piece of sushi was eaten by me. (voice)
Did you eat my sushi? (mood)
Modal auxiliary verbs:
Auxiliary verbs are added to another verb to show necessity, possibility, or capability. Like other auxiliary verbs, modal auxiliary verbs are not the main verb, but they do change its meaning slightly.
Some common examples are can, may, could, should, would, must, ought, and might.
Example: I could swim across the English Channel, but should I do it?
She must be the strongest person on the team, and might be the strongest person in the region.
Phrasal verbs:
Phrasal verbs are phrases that act as individual verbs, often combining two or more words and changing their meaning.
Example: When the bus stops, passengers get out on the sidewalk.
After losing his job, he’s getting by on savings.
The verb get, becomes many different phrasal verbs when combined with different prepositions.
The important thing to remember about phrasal verbs is that they act as a single verb, so you can still use them with other verbs and prepositions.
Transitive and Intransitive Verbs:
Transitive and Intransitive refer to how a verb acts with direct and indirect objects. A direct object is the person or thing that the action happens to, while an indirect object is the person or thing that receives the direct object. Example: Luna threw the ball to Graham.
In this example, the subject is Luna and the verb is threw. The direct object is the ball because that is what was thrown—Luna did the action to the ball. The indirect object is Graham because he received the direct object, the ball.
A transitive verb is a verb that is accompanied by a direct object in a sentence. The direct object is the noun, pronoun, or noun phrase that is having something done to it by the subject of the sentence. Both action and stative verbs can have direct objects, which means they can both be used as transitive verbs.
Examples: Leonardo ate a delicious pepperoni pizza.
She really hates broccoli.
A verb is an intransitive verb if it is not used with a direct object. Remember, only nouns, pronouns, and noun phrases can be direct objects. Prepositional phrases, adjectives, and adverbs cannot be used as direct objects. Once again, both action and stative verbs can be used as intransitive verbs.
Example:Airplanes fly.
The children slept while the adults worked.
Regular Verbs:
A verb is considered a regular verb if its past tense form and past participle ends in -ed, -d, –t.
For example, the verb look is a regular verb because both its past tense form and past participle is looked.
Sometimes, regular verbs may slightly change spelling. For example, the past tense and past participle of cry is cried.
Example: jump becomes jumped.
Slip becomes slipped.
Try becomes tried.
Lend becomes lent.
He walked two miles to the post office.
We purchased all of the supplies that we needed for the camping trip.
Irregular Verbs:
An irregular verb is a verb whose past tense and past participle form doesn’t end in -ed, -d, and doesn’t use the –t variant. Often, the spelling of these verbs changes dramatically or may not even change at all.
Examples:
be becomes am, is, are, was, were, be, being, and been. eat becomes ate, eaten.
fly becomes flew, flown.
catch becomes caught, caught.
set becomes set, set.
Cindy knew all of the right answers.
The workers took the furniture out of the truck.
Infinitives:
Infinitives look a lot like verbs because they are derived from them. An infinitive of a verb is identical to the base form of the verb.
Typically, we use infinitives with the word to in order to form infinitive phrases. Infinitive phrases can be used for a variety of reasons, such as to act like nouns, adjectives, or adverbs.
Example: the infinitive form of the verb open is open.
To play guitar in a rock band is my goal.
The writing in the letter was too small to see.
