Grammatical Functions and Categories
15
Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
2. Verbs as a word class
2.O. Identifying verbs as a word class: Overview of defining properties
2.O.1. Defining criteria for the identification of verbs as a word class
How can we identify verbs in the passages that follow? What criteria do we have at
our disposal in the process of determining which of the words in them belong to this
word class?
(1) a. The Roman republic was beginning to break down in the years after
Marius's victories over the German barbarians. Caesar joined forces with
Pompey, the popular general who had defeated Mithridates of Pontus, and
with Crassus, one of the richest men in Rome - who would have given most
of his wealth to have enjoyed some real affection from the people. The
career of Caesar amply testifies to this seemingly exaggerated combination
of virtues and characteristics.
b. The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen
tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon; everywhere the
searchlights clustered and hovered; then swept apart; here and there pitchy
clouds drifted and billowed; now and then a huge flash momentarily froze
the serene fireside glow.
c. The last time the oil companies felt the heat because of British policy was
during the reign of General Obasanjo, angry at Britain’s failure to force its
defiant ex-colony Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, towards majority rule.
2.O.1.1. The semantic (or notional) criterion
First of all, there is the traditional semantic or notional criterion which tells us that
verbs denote events (such as actions and processes) and states. But how reliable is this
criterion? It does not take long to realize that other word classes can denote these as
well. A handful of examples from the passages above will suffice to drive this point
home. While adjectives like glorious, ochre, etc. in (1) a. above can be said to denote
qualities proper, angry in (1) c. certainly denotes a state. A noun like heat also denotes a
16
Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
state. Further, nouns (which may but need not be derived from verbs) may also denote
events, i.e. actions or processes, e.g. victory, reign, failure, flash, glow. For example, in
the sentence: His victory in the competition was loudly celebrated, both victory and
competition semantically refer to events, yet they are linguistically encoded as nouns.
It appears that this criterion is not sufficient to identify verbs as a word class and that
it needs to be combined with some other criterion or a cluster of criteria. However, this
broad semantic division into verbs denoting events and verbs denoting states seems to
be universally valid, and is, in fact, extremely important in the grammatical description
of English verbs, as will become clearer in Part 3 of the present volume where we
discuss aspectual oppositions. Verbs denoting events (actions and processes) are said to
be DYNAMIC, those denoting states are STATIVE. More precisely, we should say that
verbs can be used in a dynamic or a stative way. It is true that most verbs are inherently
dynamic and just a small set of verbs are inherently stative, but there is a third set which
cannot be claimed to be inherently either dynamic or stative. They can be used either
way, with or without certain shifts in meaning. A set of criteria that may be used to test
whether a verb is used dynamically or statively is discussed in some detail in Chapter 5,
together with a subclassification of verbs based on this distinction.
2.O.1.2. Morphological (or formal) criterion
A definition of verbs may be attempted on a purely formal basis. This means that we
could check all the forms assumed to be verbs for the range of morphological processes
that they may undergo or have undergone. This morphological check-up can proceed in
two directions (with respect to derivational or word formation processes and with
respect to inflectional processes), both involving several steps.

Morphological classification of verbs with respect to word formation structure
According to their derivational (word formation) structure verbs can be:
1. Single-word verbs
2. Multi-word verbs
The former group comprises verbs that can be derivationally simple or complex, the
latter is by necessity comprised of complex units. This general division is not very
useful in practical terms, when it comes to determining whether a given form is a verb
or not. What is more, there are grave difficulties in determining the exact status of
multi-word units, i.e. to which particular subtype they belong, provided we can establish
that they are verbs at all, since there are various multi-word combinations involving not
only verbs and particles but also adjective phrases and noun phrases, which makes them
look rather like phrases, i.e. units at a next higher level of analysis, or like idioms.
Grammatical Functions and Categories
17
 Single-word verbs
Single-word verbs can consist of just one lexical morpheme or be some combination
of two or more lexical morphemes. In the former case, they are said to be simple verbs,
like:
(2)
be, fly, ride, like, come, write, jump, force, wash, etc.
Native English verbs and borrowed verbs of foreign origin that appear to consist of
more than one lexical morpheme, like become and decide, respectively, count as simple
verbs because they cannot be analyzed into smaller meaningful units that have
morphemic status in the present-day English language (they can be treated as complex
only from a historical, i.e. diachronic, and etymological point of view).
Note that word formationally simple single-word verbs are in fact morphologically
complex when furnished with some inflectional, i.e. grammatical morphemes:
(3)
a. fly – flie.s, fly.ing
b. jump – jump.s, jump.ed, jump.ing
Depending on the type of lexical morphemes involved, morphologically complex
single-word verbs can be:
1. compound-like verbs
2. affixations
Compound-like verbs involve two lexical morphemes. There are very few compound
verbs proper in English that consist of two verbal elements. Cf.:
(4) typewrite, test-market, freeze-dry
Note that some sequences of two verbs are in fact nouns or adjectives:
(5)
a. make-believe (story)
b. pass-fail (test), go-go (dancer), stop-go (economics)
More frequent are combinations of verbs with particles as first elements exemplified
in:
(6)
overachieve, overeducate, outperform
Verbs such as:
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Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
(7)
blackmail, block-bust, baby-sit, breast-feed, browbeat, carbon-date, day-dream,
deep-freeze, ghost-write, head-hunt, proof-read, spoon-feed
at first blush appear to be compound verbs with a noun or adjective as the first element,
followed by a verb. However, most of these are results of the word formation process
called back formation, whereby a more complex form, in this case a noun furnished
with some suffix (e.g. baby-sitter), is converted to the word class of verbs, which is
accompanied by the disappearance of the suffix that marks the source word as a noun.
Verbs formed by affixation can be prefixations or suffixations, depending on the
position of the affix relative to the word that functions as the base. The base itself may
be a derived word formed by one of the word formation processes.
Suffixation may be word class maintaining or word class changing. In the former
case, the base to which a verb-forming suffix is added and the resulting word belong to
the same word class, in the latter, the base and the resulting word belong to different
word classes. It so happens that all verb forming suffixes in English are word class
changing, i.e. the base is a word from some other word class, most commonly a noun or
an adjective. These suffixes that have causative or inchoative meaning (‘make/cause to
be such as base’ or ‘become such as the base’) tend to be distinctively verbalizing in
that they do not appear to be involved in the formation of words other than verbs
(although they may have the same form as some other suffixes with different meaning
and different combinatory potential). The most important verb forming suffixes in
English are:
(8)
-ate [eΙt], -en, -ify/-fy, -ize/-ise (Note: AmE / BrE)
(9)
a.
b.
c.
d.
hyphenate, orchestrate, capacitate, fractionate; activate, domesticate
deafen, sadden, blacken, widen, quicken, ripen
amplify, diversify, electrify, intensify, beautify, codify
brutalize, hospitalize, ionize, legalize, modernize, nationalize, normalize,
popularize, symbolize, terrorize, unionize,
Prefixes are normally word-class maintaining. Verb-forming prefixes in English
may, however, combine not only with verbal bases, but with non-verbal ones as well.
They may also appear with nouns and adjectives without change of word-class. The
most common verb-forming prefixes are:
(10)
be-, de-, dis-, em-/en-, inter-, mis-, pre-, re-, un-
What is the semantic contribution of these prefixes? Consider the following examples:
(11) a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
befuddle, belie, belittle, besmear, bespeak
dehumanize, dethrone, decentralize, devalue
disappear, disburden, discontinue, disown
embitter, enkindle, empower, enslave, encage
interact, interconnect, interrelate
Grammatical Functions and Categories
f.
g.
h.
i.
19
misbehave, misinform, misfire, misunderstand
preconceive, predetermine, prefabricate
reconstruct, re-elect, refuel, refresh, renew
unbalance, undo, undress, unsaddle
In which of the above words are the prefixes word class changing?
 Multi-word verbs
The most important classes of multi-word verbs in English are combinations of verbs
with particles (which may be a preposition or an adverb). There are hundreds of such
verbs. They come in three main subtypes, illustrated in (12) below:
1. phrasal verbs
2. prepositional verbs
3. phrasal-prepositional verbs
(12) a. bring about, call off, look up, take off
b. rely on, call on, hear of, listen to, refer to
c. put up with, do away with, look forward to
Phrasal verbs are single verb lexemes in spite of their leaving the impression that we
are dealing with two words. This is a single meaningful unit consisting of at least two
morphemes, which incidentally may be written as two orthographic words - the basic
verb and the particle.
Three observations are worth pointing out briefly here. First, the meaning of many
such combinations is hardly predictable from the meanings of the basic verb and of the
particle, respectively. In other words, the meaning of such verbs is often idiomatic, e.g.
bring up, fall out.
Secondly, a single combination often has more than one meaning and use. This
means, for non-native speakers, that multi word verbs have to be drilled and largely
learned by heart.
Finally, phrasal verbs, on the surface of it, look like prepositional verbs since many
particles can function as either prepositions or adverbs:
(13) We relied on him to do the job.
We are dealing in (13) with a verb governing a prepositional complement, i.e. with a
verb followed by a prepositional phrase. The meaning of such combinations is
compositional, i.e. the addition of a preposition does not change the basic meaning of
the verb. Note that there is nothing against a phrasal verb combining with a
prepositional complement, thus yielding a phrasal-prepositional verb, e.g. put up with.
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Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
The distinction between the two types of verbs can be made on syntactic grounds, too.
One of the tests is the separability of the particle with transitive phrasal verbs if the
object is pronominal:
(14) a. We gave it up.
b. *We relied it on.
For some additional notes on phrasal, prepositional and phrasal-prepositional verbs, see
2.T.1. below.

Morphological classification of verbs with respect to inflectional processes
The inventory of verbal inflectional affixes in English (all are suffixes) does not
happen to be very large: there are all in all only four morphemes that can be added to
the BASE FORM of the verb. These are:
(15) -S, -ED, -EN, -ING.
Morphemes are abstract units that may be realized in various ways by means of morphs.
To express the fact that morphemes are abstract units they are capitalized, as in (15)
above. Allomorphs are members of a family of morphs realizing a single morpheme,
e.g. [s], [z], [iz] as realizations of –s in speaks, mugs and buzzes respectively.
According to their inflectional make-up, we can distinguish four different forms of
verbs, in addition to the base form:
1. BASE FORM:
break
2. -S FORM:
testifies
used in:
a. present simple tense, except 3rd person singular;
Ex. Old bones break easily.
b. imperative;
Ex. Break the cauliflower into florets…
c. subjunctive (present);
Ex. The teacher suggested we break into groups.
d. infinitive (bare infinitive and to-infinitive)
Ex. He never let his jailers break him.
used in:
a. 3rd person singular of the present simple tense
Ex. The open door testifies to the fact that she has left
in a hurry.
Grammatical Functions and Categories
3. -ED FORM (PAST)
ED1 FORM
joined
21
used in:
a. past simple tense
Ex. Telephone operators joined the strike.
4. -EN FORM
used in:
(PAST PARTICIPLE,
-ED PARTICIPLE,
a. perfective aspect;
ED2 FORM)
Ex. Our party has defeated our opponents!
b. passive voice;
defeated
Ex. The proposal was defeated by just one vote.
c. participial clauses
Ex. Defeated by her arguments, he decided to go.
5. –ING FORM
(-ING PARTICIPLE)
beginning
used in:
a. progressive aspect;
Ex. After waiting for half an hour,she was beginning to
get angry.
b. participial clauses
Ex. Beginning to understand, he said nothing and left.
Verbs can be classified according to whether they will take these suffixes, and
according to which allomorph. First, one can distinguish between regular and irregular
verbs. Secondly, one can establish a special class of defective verbs.
Regular vs irregular verbs
The first subclassification has to do with whether the verb forms the simple past
tense (-ed form) and the past participle (-en form) by adding the –ed morph of the –ED
morpheme. There is a large number of verbs that productively take regular suffixes.
Their –ed and –en forms are therefore identical. These are called regular verbs. Some
verb forms are sometimes formed in an irregular way. There are some 200-odd so called
irregular verbs whose -ed forms (past forms) and -en forms (past participles) are not
predictable from the base form, although some of their forms may actually exhibit the
regular suffix.
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Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
(16)
base form
give
put
write
read
-ed form
gave
put
wrote
read
-en form
given
put
written
read
The term STRONG VERB is sometimes used to refer to a verb which forms the past
tense and the past participle by a change of a vowel, i.e. in an irregular manner. Verbs
forming these by adding a suffix are known as WEAK VERBs. The pairs of terms,
strong and irregular, on the one hand, and weak and regular, on the other, do not appear
to be coextensive, i.e. they do not comprise exactly the same sets. This distinction is
discussed briefly in 2.T.2. below.
Defective verbs (Anomalous finites)
There is a small number of verbs that are defective in morphological sense in that
they do not take any of the four morphemes, i.e. they have only one form that is
considered to be finite. These verbs are central modal auxiliaries such as must, can, will,
etc.:
(17) a. must, *musts, *musting, *musted, *to must
b. can, *cans, *canning, *caned, *to can
2.O.1.3. Syntactic (or functional) criterion
Looking back at our illustrative sentences we can see that some verbs can also be
identified as the central part of the predicate of a sentence. This is the so-called
functional criterion in defining this word class.
The predicate of a sentence may be simple, i.e. consist of just one word, or be quite
complex and comprise a verb form and a noun, two verb forms that can in turn be
followed by a noun, etc. In fact, the predicate can assume the form of a quite long string
of words. In all these cases, regardless how simple or complex the predicate, we can
speak of a VERB PHRASE (VP). In:
(18) would have given
we have three verb forms within one VP: would, have, and given. Is there any difference
between them in terms of their meaning and status within the VP?
Given belongs to the class called lexical or main verbs that have a meaning of their
own and most of them can function as predicates alone, or at least as the central part of
Grammatical Functions and Categories
23
the predicate or VP, when complemented by objects or other elements of a sentence.
Would and have belong to auxiliary verbs. These will be discussed in more detail in
Chapter 3.
Lexical or main verbs may be further subclassified according to the syntactic
environment in which they may appear. They can in the first step be divided into
intensive and extensive verbs.
Intensive verbs, also called copular, copulative or linking verbs, are obligatorily
followed by predicative structures (called subject complements) such as noun phrases,
adjective phrases, clauses, etc. that complete their meaning:
(19) be, seem, appear, look, sound, become, turn, grow, prove, stay, remain
(20) a. John is my friend.
b. Ann seems to be very clever.
c. They are growing restless.
All other verbs are extensive. They can be further subclassified into intransitive and
transitive verbs. A verb is intransitive if it is not obligatorily followed by any
constituent, cf. (21). Transitive verbs can be followed by one or two objects, one or two
prepositional complements, by a combination of these, or by a direct object and an
object complement. Consequently, transitive verbs are monotransitive, ditransitive, or
complex-transitive (if they are followed by an object and an object complement):
(21) a. They didn’t sleep (at all).
b. The boy yawned.
(22) a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
The girl wrote a story.
Peter sent her a letter.
We relied on our friends.
We warned him of the danger.
They made us quite happy.
Note that the term transitivity is used in a rather broad sense throughout this book to
denote verbs that are obligatorily or optionally followed by one or two complements
(NP, PrepP, AdjP). Thus, both rob and deprive can be described as ditransitive,
although only the latter obligatorily requires two complements: They robbed him. vs
*They deprived him.
2.O.2. A survey of inflected verb forms
With the vast majority of English verbs the four morphemes (-S, -ED, -EN, -ING)
are simply added to the base form in order to derive the remaining morphologically
more complex forms. Note that we have said that morphemes are abstract units that may
24
Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
be realized in various ways by means of morphs. If there are several morphs realizing a
single morpheme, they are referred to as allomorphs.
However, it is quite often the case that a verb does not display five different forms.
They are sometimes formed in an irregular way. Some of them are not distinct from
other forms. Some verbs can even have fewer or more than five morphologically
distinct forms. Later, we will see that some auxiliary verbs in fact have only one form,
and to be as many as 8 different forms.
We shall now take a closer look at the four derived forms, noting different
allomorphs that may be involved in their derivation, as well as certain spelling
peculiarities they exhibit.
2.O.2.1. -S form

Phonological realizations
There are three spoken realizations, i.e. phonologically conditioned allomorphs,
depending on the sounds that precede the 3rd person singular present simple morpheme.
These allomorphs are:
(23) [iz], [z] or [s]
The allomorph [iz] is found after bases ending in:
a. voiced sibilant sounds [z], [], [d]:
(24) a. buzz - he buzzes; sneeze – he sneezes
b. dodge - he dodges; bulge – it bulges
c. garage - he garages the car
b. voiceless sibilant sounds [s], [∫], [t∫]:
(25) a. hiss - he hisses; dress – she dresses
b. push - he pushes; wash – he washes
c. catch – it’s the early bird catches the worm; watch – he watches a match
The s-morpheme is realized as [z] after bases ending in voiced sounds other than
voiced sibilants (These sounds include not only voiced consonants but all vowels too):
(26) a. call - he calls
b. see - he sees
c. drive - he drives
It is realized as [s] after bases ending in voiceless sounds other than sibilants:
Grammatical Functions and Categories
25
(27) a. kick - he kicks
b. cut - he cuts
c. cook - he cooks

The spelling of the s-form
As for the spelling of -s forms, there are several simple rules:
1. -es is added to verbs ending in –ss, -ch, -sh, -x, -z or to the verbs ending in -o:
(28) a. pass - he passes; watch - he watches; crush – he crushes; buzz – he buzzes;
xerox – he xeroxes
b. go - he goes; do - he does; lasso - he lassoes
2. Final –s may be doubled in a few verbs (derived from nouns by means of
conversion) before the addition of –es:
(29) bus – he busses/buses
gas – he gasses/gases
focus – he focuses/focuses
3. Final -y preceded by a vowel letter remains unchanged, otherwise it becomes –ie
(the same applies to –ed forms), but it does not change in –ing forms:
(30) a. play - plays – played; stay – stays - stayed
b. buy - buys
c. cry - cries – cried - crying
d. fly - flies - flying
4. Final –ie remains before –s (but changes before –ing):
(31) die – dies - dying
tie – ties - tying
2.O.2.2. -ed form (past forms) and -en form of regular verbs

Phonological realizations
-Ed forms (past forms) and -en forms of regular verbs are identical and may be
phonologically realized in three ways, as:
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Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
(32) [Id], [t], or [d]
The allomorph [Id] occurs after bases ending in [d] or [t]:
(33) guard - guarded
hunt – hunted
The allomorph [d] is found after bases in voiced sounds other than [d]:
(34) call - called
clean - cleaned
Finally, the allomorph [t] is selected after bases that end in voiceless sounds other
than [t]:
(35) kiss - kissed
work - worked

The spelling conventions for the ed-form and en- form of regular verbs
The final consonant letter is doubled before the suffixes -ed (and –ing) in:
a. monosyllabic verbs, i.e. verbs consisting of only one syllable, spelled with a single
vowel letter immediately followed by a single consonant letter:
(36) a. plan - planned - planning
stop - stopped - stopping
b. hit - hitting
What accounts for the doubling not taking place in the following?
(37) cook - cooked - cooking
hoot - hooted - hooting
bark - barked - barking
bang - banged - banging
b. disyllabic verbs (consisting of two syllables) with the stress on the second syllable
ending in a single consonant letter immediately preceded by a single vowel letter:
(38) infer - inferred - inferring
commit - committed - committing
What accounts for the doubling not taking place in the following?
Grammatical Functions and Categories
27
(39) import - imported - importing
enter - entered - entering
c. final l is doubled even in unstressed syllable in British English (but not in
American English):
(40) travel - travelled - travelling
signal - signalled – signalling
quarrel – quarrelled - quarrelling
d. with some verbs as exceptions in BrE (but not in AmE, except handicap):
(41) traffic - trafficked - trafficking
humbug - humbugged – humbugging
program – programmed – programming
worship – worshipped – worshipping
kidnap – kidnapped – kidnapping
hiccup – hiccupped – hiccupping
handicap – handicapped - handicapping
Verbs ending in silent -e drop it before the suffix -ed:
(42) force - forced
shape – shaped
trade – traded
crease - creased
Final –ie drops –e before –ed (but changes before –ing):
(43) tie – tied – tying
lie – lied – lying
2.O.2.3. The spelling of –ing form
There is practically no allomorphy here, except for the stylistically conditioned
alternation between the default [ŋ] and the colloquial [n], as in coming vs comin’.
There are, however, a few notes concerning the spelling of this form.
Verbs ending in silent -e drop it before the suffix -ing (except those ending in -ee,
e.g. agree, agreeing, see, seeing):
(44) force - forcing
shape - shaping
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Part 2: Verbs: Their forms and types
Final -e is retained before -ing in words like singe, singeing [sinŋ] in order to
distinguish it from sing, singing. Also in the -ing forms of:
(45) canoe, dye, eye, hoe, shoe
(46) a. dye - dyed - dyeing
b. die - died - dying
Verbs ending in -ie generally drop the -e and change the i to y when before -ing, so
as to prevent two i's coming together:
(47) die - dying
tie – tying
2.T. Topics for further discussion
2.T.1. Multi-word verbs
The label multi-word verbs is used to refer to several phenomena in the present-day
English. The three main categories are phrasal verb, prepositional verb, and phrasalprepositional verb, exemplified in the following:
(1) How are you getting on?
(2) He thanked me for the help.
(3) We are looking forward to meeting you.
The label itself may appear contradictory at first blush. We have been employing the
label verb to refer to a class of words. The term word may be used in a number of ways,
to refer to a lexical item or a lexeme as an abstract unit, or to its realizations (to refer to
a morphological, a phonological unit, to an orthographic unit, to various forms of lexical
items). The term multi-word verb will be used here to refer to a verbal lexeme that
consists of more than one phonological/orthographic items, but semantically and/or
syntactically functions as a single lexeme.
Verbs are not the only word class that exhibit such complex members. There are,
among others, numerous complex prepositions, two-word sequences (4), and three-word
sequences (5), such as:
(4) because of, due to, except for, apart from, as for, according to, irrespective of,
prior to
(5) in charge of, in front of, in need of, by dint of, on behalf of
In an example such as: