THE VERB (Linguistic)

Written by, Amhar Maulana Arifin
the Student of Sharia Faculty, Islamic Economics Major, Darussalam Institute for Islamic Studies.

INTRODUCTION
The verb is perhaps the most important part of the sentence. A verb or compound verb asserts something about the subject of the sentence and express actions, events, or states of being. The verb or compound verb is the critical element of the predicate of a sentence.
The definition of verb is the part of speech (or word class) that describes an action or occurrence or indicates a state of being.
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that in syntax conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.

A. AGREEMENT
In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number and/or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreement only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which is marked by adding “-s” (I walk, he walks) or “-es” (he fishes). The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb (I walk, you walk, they walk, etc.).
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection (regular alteration according to rules of grammar). Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories. All the different forms of the same verb constitute a lexeme and the form of the verb that is conventionally used to represent the canonical form of the verb (one as seen in dictionary entries) is a lemma. Inflection of nouns and adjectives is known as declension.
Conjugated forms of a verb are called finite forms. In many languages there are also one or more forms that remain unchanged with all or most of grammatical categories: the non-finite forms, such as the infinitive or the gerund. A table giving all the conjugated variants of a verb in a given language is called a conjugation table or a verb paradigm.
A regular verb has a set of conventions for conjugation (paradigm) that derives all forms from a few specific forms or principal parts (maybe only one, such as the infinitive in English), in spelling or pronunciation. A verb that has conjugations deviating from this convention is said to be an irregular verb. Typically the principal parts are the root and/or several modifications of it (stems).
Conjugation is also the traditional name of a group of verbs that share a similar conjugation pattern in a particular language (a verb class). This is the sense in which teachers say that Latin has four conjugations of verbs. This means that any regular Latin verb can be conjugated in any person, number, tense, mood, and voice by knowing which of the four conjugation groups it belongs to, and its principal parts.
B. VALENCY
In linguistics, verb valency or valence refers to the number of arguments controlled by a verbal predicate. It is related, though not identical, to verb transitivity, which counts only object arguments of the verbal predicate. Verb valency, on the other hand, includes all arguments, including thesubject of the verb.
The number of arguments that a verb takes is called its valency or valence. Verbs can be classified according to their valency:
1. Avalent (valency = 0)
the verb has neither a subject nor an object. Zero valency does not occur in English
an avalent verb takes no arguments, e.g. It rains. (Though it is technically the subject of the verb in English, it is only a dummy subject. No other subject can replace it.)
Avalency refers to the property of a verb of taking no arguments. Avalent verbs are verbs which have no valency, they have no logical arguments, such as subject, object or otherwise. A common example of such verbs in many languages are verbs describing weather.
It rains.
It snows.
It is freezing.
It is snowing.
The point of avalency is more demonstrative and pronounced such as Spanish, which do not grammatically require a dummy pronoun as English does. For instance, the Spanish equivalent of it’s raining is llueve.
Weather verbs are often impersonal (subjectless, or avalent) in null-subject languages like Spanish, where the verb llueve means “It rains”. In English, they require a dummy pronoun, and therefore formally have a valency of 1.
2. Intransitive
(valency = 1, monovalent): the verb only has a subject. For example: “he runs”, “it falls”.
In grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb.
Examples of intransitive verbs include to die and to sleep. Transitive verbs include to see and to give.
In languages that have a passive voice, a transitive verb in the active voice becomes intransitive in the passive voice. For example, consider the following sentence:
David hugged Mary.
In this sentence, “hugged” is a transitive verb taking “Mary” as its object. The sentence can be passivized with the direct object “Mary” as the grammatical subject as follows:
Mary was hugged.
This shift is called promotion of the object.
The passive-voice construction cannot take an object. The passivized sentence could be continued with the agent:
Mary was hugged by David.
It cannot be continued with a direct object to be taken by “was hugged.” For example, it would be ungrammatical to write “Mary was hugged her daughter” in order to show that Mary and her daughter shared a hug.
Intransitive verbs can be passivized in some languages. In English, intransitive verbs can be used in the passive voice when a prepositional phrase is included, as in, “The houses were lived in by millions of people.”
3. Transitive (valency = 2, divalent)
he verb has a subject and a direct object. For example: “she eats fish”, “we hunt nothing”.
In syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.
Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:
You pushed the bag. (“bag” is the direct object of “pushed”)
I hate you. (“you” is the direct object of “hate”)
I gave you the doll. (“doll” is the direct object, and “you” is the non-prepositional indirect object of “give”)
John traded his apple and Jane’s orange with her. (“his apple and Jane’s orange” is the object of “traded”, but “with her” is not)
I ate the pie. (“pie” is an object of “ate”)
I tried on the shoes. (“shoes” is an object of “tried on”)
4. Ditransitive
(valency = 3, trivalent) the verb has a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object. For example: “He gives her a flower.”
In grammar, a ditransitive verb is a verb which takes a subject and two objects which refer to a recipient and a theme. According to certain linguistics considerations, these objects may be calleddirect and indirect, or primary and secondary. This is in contrast to monotransitive verbs, which take only one object, a direct object.
In languages which mark grammatical case, it is common to differentiate the objects of a ditransitive verb using, for example, the accusative case for the direct object, and the dative case for the indirect object (but this morphological alignment is not unique; see below). In languages without morphological case (such as English for the most part) the objects are distinguished by word order and/or context.
English has a number of generally ditransitive verbs, such as give, grant, and tell and many transitive verbs that can take an additional argument (commonly a beneficiary or target of the action), such as pass, read, bake, etc.:
He gave Mary ten dollars.
He passed Paul the ball.
Jean read him the books.
She is baking him a cake.
English grammar allows for these sentences to be written alternately with a preposition (to or for):
He gave ten dollars to Mary.
He passed the ball to Paul.
Jean read the books to/for him.
She is baking a cake for him., etc.
The latter form is grammatically correct in every case, but in some dialects the former (without a preposition) is considered ungrammatical, or at least unnatural-sounding, when both objects are pronouns (as in He gave me it).
Sometimes one of the forms is perceived as wrong for idiosyncratic reasons (idioms tend to be fixed in form) or the verb simply dictates one of the patterns and excludes the other:
*Give a break to me (grammatical, but always phrased Give me a break)
*He introduced Susan his brother (usually phrased He introduced his brother to Susan)
In certain dialects of English, many verbs not normally treated as ditransitive are allowed to take a second object that shows a beneficiary, generally of an action performed for oneself.
Again, this usage is idiomatic, learnt only with experience.
Passive voice of ditransitive
Many ditransitive verbs have a passive voice form which can take a direct object. Contrast the active and two forms of the passive:
Active:
Jean gave the books to him.
Jean gave him the books.
Passive:
The books were given to him by Jean.
He was given the books by Jean.
Not all languages have a passive voice, and some that do have one (e.g. Polish) don’t allow the indirect object of a ditransitive verb to be promoted to subject by passivization, as English does. In others like Dutch a passivation is possible but requires a different auxiliary: “krijgen” instead of “worden”.
E.g. schenken means “to donate, to give”:
Active: Jan schonk hem de boeken – John donated the books to him.
Passive: De boeken werden door Jan aan hem geschonken.
Pseudo-passive: Hij kreeg de boeken door Jan geschonken.

C. TENSES, ASPECT, AND MODALITY
A single-word verb contains information about time (past, present, future), person and number. The process of grammatically modifying a verb to express this information is called conjugation.
Tense–aspect–mood, commonly and also called tense–modality, is the grammatical system in a language that covers the expression of tense (location in time),aspect (fabric of time a single block of time, continuous flow of time, or repetitive occurrence), and mood or modality (degree of necessity, obligation, probability, ability). In some cases, evidentiality (whether evidence exists for the statement, and if so what kind) may also be included.
1. Tense
Depending on the language, verbs may express grammatical tense, aspect, or modality. Grammatical tense is the use of auxiliary verbs or inflections to convey whether the action or state is before, simultaneous with, or after some reference point. The reference point could be the time of utterance, in which case the verb expresses absolute tense, or it could be a past, present, or future time of reference previously established in the sentence, in which case the verb expresses relative tense.
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place. Some typical tenses are present, past, and future.
Tense can make finer distinctions than simple past-present-future; past tenses for example can cover general past, immediate past, or distant past, with the only difference between them being the distance on the timeline between the temporal reference points. Such distinctions are not precise: an event may be described in the remote past because it feels remote to the speaker, not because a set number of days have passed since it happened; it may also be remote because it is being contrasted with another, more recent, past event.
In absolute tense, as in English, tense indicates when the time of assertion, time of completion, or time of evaluation occurs relative to the utterance itself (time of utterance). In relative tense, on the other hand, tense is relative to some given event.
The number of tenses in a language may be disputed, because the term tense is often used to represent any combination of tense proper, aspect, and mood. In many texts the term “tense” may indicate qualities of uncertainty, frequency, completion, duration, possibility, or whether information derives from experience or hearsay (evidentiality).Tense differs from aspect, which encodes how a situation or action occurs in time rather than when. In many languages, there are grammatical forms which express several of these meanings (see tense–aspect–mood).
Tenses are broadly classified as present, past, or future. In absolute-tense systems, these indicate the temporal distance from the time of utterance. In relative-tense systems, they indicate temporal distance from a point of time established in the discourse. There are also absolute-relative tenses, which are two degrees removed from the temporal reference point, such as future-in-future (at some time in the future, event will still be in the future) and future-in-past (at some time in the past, event was in the future).
Some tenses:
Future tenses.
 Immediate future: right now
 Near future: soon
 Hodiernal future: later today
 Vespertine future: this evening[citation needed]
 Post-hodiernal: after today
 Crastinal: tomorrow
 Remote future, distant future
 Posterior tense (relative future tense)
 Nonfuture tense: refers to either the present or the past, but does not clearly specify which. Contrasts with future.
Present tense
 Still tense: indicates a situation held to be the case, at or immediately before the utterance
 Nonpast tense: refers to either the present or the future, but does not clearly specify which. Contrasts with past.
 Past tenses. Some languages have different past tenses to indicate how far into the past we are talking about.
 Immediate past: very recent past, just now
 Recent past: in the last few days/weeks/months (conception varies)
 Nonrecent past: contrasts with recent past
 Hodiernal past: earlier today
 Matutinal past: this morning[citation needed]
 Prehodiernal: before today
 Hesternal: yesterday or early, but not remote
 Prehesternal: before yesterday
 Remote past: more than a few days/weeks/months ago (conception varies)
 Nonremote past: contrasts with remote past
 Ancestral past, legendary past
 General past: the entire past conceived as a whole
 Anterior tense (relative past tense)
2. Aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow (or lack thereof) in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker. A basic distinction is with regard to whether the speaker looks at a situation as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the situation (“I ate”), or with no reference to temporal bounds but with reference to the nature of the flow of time during the situation (“I was eating”, “I used to eat”). The unitary view without internal temporal flow is known as the perfective aspect, while the non-bounded view with reference to temporal flow is known as the imperfective aspect. Within the imperfective aspect, further common aspectual distinctions include whether the situation is repetitive or habitual (“I used to eat”), is continuous in a particular time frame (“I was eating”), or has continuing relevance in a later time frame (“I have eaten”). Any one language will have at most a subset of the aspectual distinctions attested in the world’s languages.
Aspect expresses how the action or state occurs through time. Important examples include:
a. perfective aspect
in which the action is viewed in its entirety though completion (as in “I saw the car”)
The perfective aspect, sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms variously called “aorist”, “preterite”, and “simple past”. Although the essence of the perfective is an event seen as a whole, a unit without internal structure.
The perfective aspect is distinguished from the imperfective aspect, which presents an event as having internal structure (such as ongoing or habitual actions), and from the prospective aspect, which describes impending action.
b. imperfective aspect,
in which the action is viewed as on going.
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a general imperfective, others have distinct aspects for one or more of its various roles, such as progressive, habitual, and iterative aspects.
in some languages a verb could express imperfective aspect more narrowly as:
• habitual aspect,
in which the action occurs repeatedly (as in “I used to go there every day”)
• continuous aspect
in which the action occurs without pause.
continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. It is a verb category with two principal meaning components: (limited) duration and (possible) incompletion. Most languages treat continuous and progressive aspects as alike and use the two terms interchangeably, but there are languages that distinguish them.
continuous aspect can be further subdivided into
– stative aspect,
in which the situation is a fixed (as in “I know French”),
A stative verb is one which asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property (possibly in relation to its other arguments). Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration. Verbs which are not stative are often called dynamic verbs.
Examples of sentences with stative verbs:
he has always loved it.
I am tired.
I have two children.
I like the color blue.
I think they want something to eat.
We hold these truths to be self-evident…
The case contains six bottles.
This would imply that we didn’t care.

The following are not stative:
You are being silly.
She is having a baby.
Quiet please, I am thinking.

– progressive aspect
in which the situation continuously evolves (as in “I am running”)
The continuous and progressive aspects are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. It is a verb category with two principal meaning components: (limited) duration and (possible) incompletion. Most languages treat continuous and progressive aspects as alike and use the two terms interchangeably, but there are languages that distinguish them.
c. Perfect
which combines elements of both aspect and tense, and in which both a prior event and the state resulting from it are expressed (as in “I have studied well”)
In linguistics, the perfect occasionally called the retrospective to avoid confusion with the perfective aspect, is a combination of aspect and tense that calls a listener’s attention to the consequences, at some time of perspective (time of reference), generated by a prior situation, rather than just to the situation itself. The time of perspective itself is given by the tense of the helping verb, and usually the tense and the aspect are combined into a single tense-aspect form: the present perfect, the past perfect (also known as the pluperfect), or the future perfect.
The perfect is distinct from the perfective, which marks a situation as a single event, without internal structure. A sentence in the perfective aspect cannot be in the perfect and vice versa .
The perfect can refer to events in the past that have been finished (such as “He has already eaten dinner”) as well as events that are ongoing (such as “He had been working on this novel for a year” or “He has composed operas for twenty years”); all are characterized by continued relevance to the speaker at the time of perspective.
The perfect contrasts with the prospective, which encodes the present relevance or anticipation of a future event. While the perfect is a relatively uniform category cross-linguistically, its relation to the experiential and resultative aspects is complex — the latter two are not simply restricted cases of the perfect.
Aspect can either be lexical, in which case the aspect is embedded in the verb’s meaning (as in “the sun shines”, where “shines” is lexically stative); or it can be grammatically expressed, as in “I am running”.
3. Modality
Modality expresses the speaker’s attitude toward the action or state given by the verb, especially with regard to degree of necessity, obligation, or permission (“You must go”, “You should go”, “You may go”), determination or willingness (“I will do this no matter what”), degree of probability (“It must be raining by now”, “It may be raining”, “It might be raining”), or ability (“I can speak French”). All languages can express modality with adverbs, but some also use verbal forms as in the given examples. If the verbal expression of modality involves the use of an auxiliary verb, that auxiliary is called a modal verb. If the verbal expression of modality involves inflection, we have the special case of mood; moods include the indicative (as in “I am there”), the subjunctive (as in “I wish I were there”), and the imperative (“Be there!”).

D. VOICE
The voice of a verb expresses whether the subject of the verb is performing the action of the verb or whether the action is being performed on the subject. The two most common voices are the active voice (as in “I saw the car”) and the passive voice (as in “The car was seen by me” or simply “The car was seen”).

REFERENCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitive_verb
http://languagearts.pppst.com/verbtenses.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/verb
http://www.chompchomp.com/terms/verb.htm
http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/verbterm.htm