So now on to verbs. We all have heard that a verb is an action word, or maybe that a verb is an action or state. But you may have suspected that we’re going to abandon that in favor of identifying verbs according to their morphology and syntax.
Why is the “verb is an action or state” an inadequate definition? Well, adjectives and nouns can also express states; in the phrase “a happy child” happy is a state, but it’s an adjective, not a verb. In a phrase like “your perseverance," you could say that perseverance is a state – but it’s a noun, not a verb. Nouns can also express actions: the kick, a struggle, the mingling, etc. So this is the kind of logical subjectivity that I’m talking about when I say that the traditional notions of parts of speech can be misleading and make us doubt our intuitions. And here again, the nonsense words approach to sentence analysis reinforces that we rely on morphology and syntax not meaning to identify categories. What’s the verb in this sentence?
The quixlets blorked a chorn.
You can identify blorked as a verb here because of -ed suffix, which you know (even if you don’t know you know) is a past tense ending that attaches to verbs. We also know it’s a verb because of its position between the subject noun phrase, the quixlets, and the object noun phrase, a chorn, a typical position for verbs in English. We’ll return to more discussion of the syntax (their position in relation to other words) of verb phrases.
Now on to more verb morphology.
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