Verb

verb

a part of speech that denotes action or condition and is used in a sentence primarily as a predicate. The grammatical meaning of action or condition becomes clear in one or another system of grammatical categories that are characteristic of the verb (in the given language) and, in their aggregate, distinguish it from other parts of speech in that language. These grammatical categories are expressed by conjugation, which may be simple (Russian pishu, “I write,” or pisal, “I [thou, he] wrote”; or Ukrainian pysatymu, “I will write”) or complex, using helping verbs (budu pisat’, “I will write”) or particles (pisal by, “I [thou, he] would write”).

The most common grammatical categories of the verb are tense, mood, aspect, and voice. When functioning as a predicate, the verb relates to the subject of the sentence and sometimes by its form indicates the subject, making it unnecessary (for example, in the Russian poidesh’, “thou wilt go,” the verb form itself indicates the second person familiar—that is, the fact that the action is being performed by the person being spoken to). In many languages the verb agrees with the subject in person and number, and sometimes (as in Arabic and in Russian in the past tense and subjunctive) in gender or, in many African and some Caucasian languages, in class. In verbs of some languages the categories of person and number are absent altogether (for example, the Danish skriver means “I write,” “thou writest,” “he writes,” and “we write”).

In many languages, verbs having objects agree with these objects, direct and indirect (polypersonal conjugation). Thus, in Adygei se o u-s-shag, “I took thee,” the first prefix, u-, refers to the direct object o (thee), and the second prefix, -s-, refers to the subject, se (I). Verbs not used with a subject are called impersonal verbs—Russian svetaet, “it’s getting light”, or smerkaetsia, “it’s getting dark.” In several languages verbs are used only with a so-called formal subject and do not refer to a real person or subject—Russian svetaet, “it’s getting light”; German es dämmert, “it’s getting dark.”

The predicate function is not the only syntactic function of the verb; it appears in other functions, but usually in a specific form. In Chinese the verb used as an attribute must affix the particle ti which has the effect of annulling its predicative quality (for example, compare wo k’an ti shu, “the book being read by me,” and wo k’an shu, “I read the book”). In many languages there are entire series of verb forms that are rarely or never used as predicates: participles, verbal adverbs, infinitives, supine forms, gerunds, masdars (verbal nouns), and so on.