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Grammar series — 4
Verbs
Author: P Wilson
The way that the verb is used is very complex. In the leaflet Grammar series – 1. Word Classes (basic),
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 satisfactory short definitions. 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 assure 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 series — 1 leaflet). 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 than 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 describing some form of past experience 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.)
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(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 goes 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
madman” (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 series - 1. Word Classes (basic)) 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
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
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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?”
To 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).
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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.
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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.”
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“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.
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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’.
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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 the conditional or subjunctive, it is ‘were’.
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 p. 6.) 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 next 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.
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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 make’ → ‘making’, ‘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 perfect aspect
(in the active voice). It is also 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 its own 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
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to know that there are such things as verbal nouns and participles. They can look alike; they must be
distinguished by their function.
Phrasal Verbs
Learning English as a foreign language is bedevilled by the existence of verbs whose meaning is contained
in more than one word, for example ‘to be fed up with’. This is a group of words with a single meaning – it is
a lexical unit. It is not simply to be understood by taking the word ‘fed’ (the -ed participle of ‘to feed’) in the
passive voice, and the prepositions ‘up’ and ‘with’.
Often, a phrasal verb’s second element (after the verb) is a preposition. Here, it needs a complement. “He
came across a solution to his problem”, for example; the preposition ‘across’ needs a complement – here, ‘a
solution’ with its own description (Adjective Phrase) ‘to his problem’. Hence the term prepositional verb is
often used.
But other phrasal verbs consist of a verb and some other element. This is most usually an adverb (or an
adverb particle). We ‘think ahead’, for example; or ‘look back’. Sometimes such a phrasal verb is followed
by a further preposition introducing an adverbial phrase – we might ‘look back on the past’, or ‘think ahead
to next year’.
This is another distinction best left to those with an interest in the theory of grammar. For the purposes of a
working, everyday knowledge of the subject, it is best to think of all constructions where a verb with a
particular meaning consists of more than one word as phrasal verbs. Leave the subtle distinctions to
others.
Last Note
The primary verb to be, as has already been pointed out in this leaflet, is exceptional. It is the only English
verb with more than five forms; and it has two uses as an auxiliary, the be-progressive and the be-passive.
One other peculiarity – in its semantic role (its meaning) – should be mentioned.
To be is the only verb with its own name. It is known as the copula. This (a Latin word meaning ‘a bond or
tie’) refers to its unique function of equating two things – of saying that a person, for example, is something,
a nationality, a profession, or in an aesthetic state, etc: “He is Scottish”, “They are teachers” or “She is
beautiful”.
It is this verb above all that gives difficulty to the old primary school definition of a verb as ‘a doing word’. It
is why the secondary definition (as I called it in Grammar series - 1) of ‘a word that expresses an action or a
state’ is necessary. Possibly the most common single verb in English does not express ‘doing’. When we
say “John is a nurse” we do not mean that he is doing anything. We are trying to describe his state, not to
say what action he is performing.
There are a few similar verbs known as copulative verbs, such as ‘to seem’ (“She seems sad” is roughly
equivalent to “She seems to be sad”) and ‘to become’.
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