Verb

This article is about the part of speech. For the physical activity program, see VERB (program). For English usage of verbs, see English verbs. For the radio programme, see The Verb.

A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is part of speech that in syntax generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), 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 or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb will or shall.

For example:

  • Lucy will go to school. (action, future)
  • Barack Obama became the President of the United States in 2009. (occurrence, past)
  • Mike Trout is a center fielder. (state of being, present)

Every language discovered so far makes a some form of noun-verb distinction,[1] possibly because of the graph-like nature of communicated meaning by humans, i.e. nouns being the "entities" and verbs being the "links" between them.[2]

  1. ^ David Adger (2019). Language Unlimited: The science behind our most creative power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 78. ISBN 978-0-19-882809-9.
  2. ^ Silva, Vivian S.; Freitas, André; Handschuh, Siegfried. "Building a Knowledge Graph from Natural Language Definitions for Interpretable Text Entailment Recognition" (PDF). ACL Anthology. Archived (PDF) from the original on Oct 3, 2023.