Talk:Verb

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[edit] Verb Tenses

There are dozens upon dozens of verb tenses across many Western languages: present, progressive, imperfect, preterite, present subjunctive, past subjunctive, conditional, future, present perfect, past perfect, etc. Any mention of these? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.157.26.250 (talk • contribs) 00:15, 25 December 2005

You're mixing tense with aspect and mood, but anyway, grammatical tense, present tense, past tense, etc., and the corresponding language articles or subarticles (English verbs, Spanish verbs, etc.) have lots of material. Including everything in this same article would be too much. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 04:20, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] "Action verbs"?

The entry for "Action verb" redirects to "Verb". There is no reference to the term in the article. One is left to wonder what is meant by this curiously redundant term, apparently used by Hunter S. Thompson. 216.75.170.81 16:45, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

An action verb is as opposed to a state-of-being verb (exist, be, copulas, etc.). AFAIK, it's a grammar-school distinction, not one actually used by linguists; I'm not sure what purpose it's supposed to serve. I don't think action verb should redirect here. Ruakh 18:33, 28 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Modal verbs

Where do I find information on modal verbs? Ncik 19:50, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

Are you looking for information on English's modal auxiliary verbs? (Should, might, etc.) Ruakh 19:58, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ditransitive verbs

I've just reverted the change from I gave flowers to John to I gave John flowers. In English the indirect object is often preceded by to and that doesn't make the verb any less ditransitive. There are some borderline cases in English where you can't distinguish between a transitive verb with a complement and a ditransitive verb, but this is not one of those. Cf also the "personal a" of Spanish (Spanish prepositions#Personal a): a direct object that is marked by a preposition. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 10:30, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

The terminology that we English-speakers learned in grade school has indirect object referring specifically to an object of a verb that is not a direct object and that is not marked by a preposition. (This is partly because according to the grammar that we learned in grade school, there's no such thing as an object of a verb that's marked by a preposition; in such a sentence as "I gave flowers to John," John was presented as the object of to, not as an object of gave.) It was only when we studied certain foreign languages, such as French or Spanish, that we were exposed to a broader sense of the term indirect object, one that included French's complément d'objet indirect or Spanish's complemento de objeto directo. User 68.42.71.5 presumably never studied one of these languages, or did so but never realized that this broader use of indirect object might be applied in English as well.
Personally, while I do accept the current example as correct, I don't see a reason to insist on "gave flowers to John" over the "gave John flowers" that more English-speakers will recognize. Ruakh 09:42, 25 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tlingit?

How is an impersonal verb in Tlingit different from an impersonal verb in any other null subject language? And how is an objective verb different from an unaccusative verb? Ruakh 06:03, 25 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Quality of this article

This article is in serious need of improvement. I'd like to list a number of things that seem to be controversial, wrong, or out of keeping with practices in linguistics.

  • The definition on top of the page "A verb is a part of speech that usually denotes action [...], occurrence, ..," is uninformative and not in line with standard practices in linguistics. The standard would be to provide morpho-syntactic criteria.
  • The discussion of null-ary verbs is misleading, undocumented and controversial. People have argued that weather predicates do have a semantic argument (in all langueages), and the distinction between null-subject languages and non-null-subject languages is unrelated to the arity of the relevant verbs. That is actually completely uncontroversial.
  • There isn't a single citation in the article.
  • The discussion of Tlingit seems slightly out of place, and it isn't supported by examples or citations. It may be good to illustrate things with other languages, but the way that it stands, it's somewhat unclear what purpose it serves.
  • The discussion of passive and active participles as "describing nouns" is opaque. I've never heard voice being described in this way before, and I'm not sure what is meant by "describing nouns" here.
  • A number of relevant distinctions are missing from the article, such as that between unergatives and unaccusatives, psuch verbs and other classes.

Neither 18:08, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

I, for one, would welcome any improvements you can offer, but let me try to respond to some of your points, so you understand what the article is trying to do:
  • It's true that linguists describe lexical categories in terms of morphology, syntactic distribution, etc., but for those who aren't linguists, I think it's helpful to give a definition that makes some reference to semantics. This has the additional benefit that it resembles the definition most people learned in school. Now, it has the obvious weakness that a word's meaning doesn't really correspond to its lexical category (explode and explosion have roughly the same meaning, aside from one being a verb and one a noun), but I think it's a start. (My opinion on this could definitely be swayed, if you can provide a linguistically valid definition that fits in one normal sentence and is easily understood by a non-linguist.)
  • So you're saying that "is raining" and "está lloviendo" either both have valency zero, or both have valency one, depending whom you ask?
  • That needs to be fixed.
  • Agreed.
  • You seem to be misunderstanding something. Adjectives, in traditional pedagogy, are said to describe nouns. Participles, in traditional pedagogy, are said to be verbal adjectives: verb forms that act as adjectives by describing nouns. In no way is "describing nouns" intended to describe voice.
  • Please feel free to add such things. What's a psuch verb?
(That's not to say that you shouldn't delete things; I just didn't want your deletions to be based in misunderstanding.)
Ruakh 22:47, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
Thanks again for the quick reply. I agree that the discussion shoud cater mainly to non-linguists (linguists aren't going to look up "verb" on wikipedia, and if they do, it is to check that the entry is correct or someting like that). But I also think it should reflect our current understanding of the matter and that that should be given priority. Hence, in all my edits, I've tried to discuss the commonsense understanding of things in a fair way, and added whatever problems have lead linguists to abandon that view. As it stands, I think this article is in a precarious state. When I choose to complain about this article, rather than revise it, it is simply because, if I were to edit it, I would need to sit down and read up on verbs and verb classes to get my facts and references right, etc. And there is a huge literature... I'm thinking of contacting somebody who knows more about it.
Weather predicates: People have argued (i'm not sure who right now) that they have an "atmospheric" argument, and that this can explain the difference between "there" expletives and "it" expletives, among other things. Look, I don't have a stake in this, but whether or not it's right, it carries over to null-subject languages: these allow omission of subjects in general, but, even when the subject is ommitted, the relevant sentence is interpreted as though there was one. For example, in Italian, the sentence "Capisco." means "I understand." There's no sense in which the arity of the verb "capire" has changed when they say "Io capisco." ('I understand'): What changes is the emphasis on the subject.
Passives: My complaint is more about the use of the term "noun" than the term "describe" I think. I'm also in the habit of using "describe" when "predicated of" would probably be more accurate. But nouns aren't subjects: noun phrases are, among other kinds of phrases. Furthermore, there is an important distinction between verbal and adjectival passives. The problem with the section on passives is that it's so user friedly as to become useless, or that's how I see it. :)
"psuch verbs" was a typo: I meant "psych verbs." These have a range of interesting grammatical properties discussed by Belletti and Rizzi in some famous article, and examples include "fear." Again, I don't remember exactly what the facts are, and it would be much easier for a real expert on the matter to remedy the shortcomings.
Again, I added the flags to alert the reader to the fact that this article simply doesn't live up to the standards one should expect. I hope to be able to change this, or get somebody else to, in the near future. Neither 00:34, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
Most of your points are valid, and I have no response, but I still don't get your weather-verb/null-subject point. Clearly entiendo has valency 1 both in "Entendio" and in "Yo entendio" (Spanish for "I understand" and "I understand", respectively); but llueve is different in that *"Él llueve" (Spanish for *"It rains") is impossible. It makes perfect sense to me to say that entender, understand, and rain have valency 1, but that llover has valency 0. Ruakh 01:51, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
I don't mind your insisting on this point, because I think it's important. Let me begin by emphasizing that I do think your point of view makes sense. But in current syntactic theory, among the most mysterious phenomena involve apparently vacious expressions, like the "there" of "there seems to be a unicorn in my garden," and a lot of work has aimed at solving that problem. Let's consider the arity of the verb "seem." Sometimes its subect is "it", as in "it seems to be raining outside" and sometimes it's "there" as in the previous example I gave. At other times one can have regular noun phrase subjects, as in "John seems to be clever." The latter sentece means the same as "It seems that John is clever." So, even though "John" can serve as the subject of "seem" in one sense, this is not a matter of the arity of "seem." In other cases, you even get parts of an idiomatic expression to serve as the subect of seem, as in: "The shit seems to be hitting the fan." In that case, it would make very little sense to say that "the shit" is an argument of the verb "seem". Now, in null-subject languages, the subject slot of "seem" is only filled when the subject would be a "real" noun phrase, i.e. one doesn't use "fillers" like "there" and "it." Thus "seem" seems to be 1-ary, selecting for one sentential argument. If that argument is a finite sentence "that John is clever," one fills the subject slot with a semantically vacuous "it." This "it" doesn't appear to be an "argument." If the (sentential) argument is an infinitival clause, then the subject of the infinitival clause becomes the subject of "seem" (raising), even if that subject is a semantically vacuous filler, like "it" or "there" or part of an idiom chunk belonging in the infinitival clause. Facts like these have made syntacticians refer to "fillers" like "it" and "there" as expletives. (sorry if I'm being overly pedagogical here) For languages like English, then, there seems to be an absolute requirement that the subject slot be filled, regardless of whether the arity of the verb provides an argument to fill it. This requirement is usually referred to as the Extended Projection Principle" (EPP, so-called for irrelevant historical reasons). The point is that null-subject languages never realize fillers, because they obviously don't have a requirement that their subject slots be filled by visible expressions in the same way.
Now, Spanish is evidently like this, i.e. it doesn't obey the EPP. Suppose first that weather predicates are null-ary. Then we don't expect Spanish to realize any expletive in the relevant sentences. Suppose, on the other hand, that weather predicates are 1-ary. Then, in order to see what we expect from Spanish weather predicates (given that it doesn't obey the EPP) depends on what the conditions are under which subjects can be dropped and realized in this language. Suppose we say (which I think would be fairly accurate), that you only express the subject if you want to emphasize it, or contrast it to some other potential subject. Then, we don't expect expletives to ever show up with weather predicates, just because whatever subject they have they can't be emphasized or contrasted, even in English (or in any other language that has weather expletives): "*It's IT that rains." "*only IT rains." "*IT rains, not that."
My point is thus that whether we think weather predicates are 1-ary or 0-ary, the distinction between null-subject languages and other languages is sort of orthogonal to the discussion of the arity of verbs. That said, when and why languages "obey the EPP" is among the outstanding problems of contemporary grammatical theory. Whoever solves it will be famous. :)
Neither 03:55, 27 October 2006 (UTC)
Your discussion seems interesting (though, I have to admit, way over my head), but it also seems excessively focused on English. Am I being a total ignoramus, if my instinctive reaction is "No wonder you don't believe in zero-valency verbs — you're thinking in English!" Don't take this too seriously, though. I really am over my head here, and just watching the show, mostly. Debate on. ;-) FilipeS 14:30, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
Not really so much focused on English: the discussion is about whether there's a difference between English and Spanish with respect to the arity of weather predicates. The article says there is, and I say that's at best controversial, and unsupported by arguments and citations. :) Neither 02:31, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

discus mood of verb..

[edit] merge

Can I suggest merging some info at verbal agreement here; or maybe into grammatical conjugation. The verbal agreement page is ancient, found in Special:Ancientpages, with few links. --Montchav 00:05, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

I support the merger of verbal agreement with grammatical conjugation. I'm unsure about merging either with verb. :-) FilipeS 00:15, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. —RuakhTALK 00:42, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but this is a baffling suggestion. A verbal agreement is an entirely different concept to a verb! I don't even see how the two are related. One is an agreement based on words (when often an "oral agreement" is what is actually meant); the other is the name applied to "doing" words. I'm not sure that the proposer understands the grammatical point of verbs, but maybe I'm doing him/her an injustice. IXIA 16:21, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
The suggestion would be less baffling if you took a look at Verbal agreement. :-) —RuakhTALK 19:01, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

In all fairness, the suggestion was "merging some info at verbal agreement here". FilipeS 17:12, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Verbs

Verb is an action word..For example:dancing,watching,reading and many more.. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 121.1.53.7 (talk • contribs) 11:07, 6 June 2007 (UTC).

[edit] valency

the discussion on the valency of weather predicates does in fact vary on who you ask. (I'm not good at writing wiki-style, so someone please make that edit.) also, the tlingit discussion makes no sense here at least, as it is. And last, shouldn't there be some discussion or a link to the fact that verbs are a member of the class 'predicate'? 169.233.114.152 (talk) 21:39, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

The statement: "It is impossible to have verbs with zero valency. . . .In English, they require a dummy pronoun, and therefore formally have a valency of 1." is incorrect. It's possible to have a one-word sentence with a verb no noun at all, the subject being implied. "Go", "Come", "Stop", etc. Statalyzer (talk) 20:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

I think you're referring to imperative formation. The subject is nearly always implied in the imperative; this is true pretty much cross-linguistically. I agree though that the statement about 0 valence is overstated. The weather it is typically regarded as having 0 *semantic* valence. It's always important to make a distinction between syntactic vs. semantic valence, because a verb like eat for example will always have a semantic valence of 2 (S and DO) regardless of whether or not the DO is syntactically expressed in the sentence. — Zerida ☥ 22:15, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

I'll add my voice to the calls above for a knowledgeable person to expand on the definition of "verb" in this article; e.g. looking at semantic criteria, syntactic and morphological criteria, and definitional controversies, as well as finding sources for them! :)

I think the "noun" article is a good guide on how to proceed with this (and it would make sense to have the two articles in a similar format). I'm not at all confident to tackle this, but I may give it a go in a while if this comment doesn't spark any discussion.

As for distinguishing nouns from verbs, here's a start (looking at formal, semantic and syntactic properties):

  • Sapir, E. 1921. Language. New York: Hartcourt, Brace and World.
  • Robins, R. 1952. "Noun and Verb in Universal Grammar". Language, 28(3), pp. 289-298.
  • Jacobsen, W. 1979. "Noun and Verb in Nootkan". Heritage Record 4, pp. 83-155.

Others have suggested that the noun-verb category division is irrelevant and unfounded:

  • Hopper, P. and S. Thompson. 1985. "The Iconicity of the Universal Categories 'Noun' and 'Verbs'". In Typological Studies in Language: Iconicity and Syntax. John Haiman (ed), vol. 6, pp. 151-183, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

ntennis 00:06, 11 February 2008 (UTC)