Verb denotes an occurrence, an action or a state of being. In this article, we will see about the types of verbs in English language.
Meaning of verb:
A verb is nothing but a word used to show that an action is taking place or to indicate the existence of a state or condition or the part of speech to which such a word belongs. Verb also denotes predicate of sentence (i.e.) the part of a clause or a sentence that includes the verb, but excludes the subject of the verb. On the basis of the language, a verb might vary in form based on several factors like voice, tense, mood and aspect.
Types of verb:
Verb can be classified on two different categories. The first category is that verb can be divided according to the job they do in a sentence this is also called as syntactically division of verbs and under this category the types include finite verbs, non-finite verbs and helping verbs or auxiliary verbs. The second category is that verb can be divided according to the basis of how they are formed. This is also termed as morphological division of verbs and this includes regular verbs, irregular verbs, compound verbs and phrasal verbs.
Syntactical division of verbs:
- Finite verbs:
Finite verbs are those which change according to the words like you, we, she, he and they. Finite means limited the power of the above-mentioned words is limited they are called finite verbs. Finite verbs can be classified further into linking, transitive and intransitive verbs
- Non-finite verbs:
Non-finite verbs are verbs which do not change. Not even a single word in a sentence can create a change on these verbs. This type can include infinitives, gerunds and participles.
- Auxiliary verb or helping verb:
An auxiliary verb is also termed as helping verb and it stands before the main verb and change the speaker’s perspective towards the action or the tense of action. The presence of auxiliary verb in a sentence can change the way in which the sentence is negated and in the way in which a question is formed in a sentence. Auxiliary verb can be further classified into primary and modal auxiliaries.
Morphological division of verbs:
- Regular verbs:
Whatever may be the language, the regular verb is a verb whose conjugation is followed by the typical grammatical inflections.
- Irregular verbs:
An irregular verb is a verb in which the ‘ed’ is not added to the past tense words. For instance, the past tense of the word sing is sang and not singed, so this is an irregular verb.
- Compound verbs:
A compound verb is also called as a complex predicate and it is a multi-word compound, which acts as a single verb.
- Phrasal verbs:
A phrasal verb is nothing but a combination of a preposition and a verb, an adverb and a verb or a verb with both prepositions and adverbs.
The other forms of verb include light verb, raising verb and reflexive verb.