Verb

The verb is the part of the sentence (specifically a lexical category) that expresses an action, movement, existence, achievement, condition or state of the subject. Syntactically it represents a predication. In the sentence, the conjugated verb functions as the syntactic head of the predicate (if the verb is in a conjugated form it will generally occupy the position of the head of the time phrase, and if not of a simple verb phrase).

Verbs, according to their valence or grammar, can be classified as intransitive, transitive, ditransitive, etc. They are transitive when the verb requires more than one mandatory argument. Intransitives have only one required argument.

Introduction

The verb is the variable part of the sentence that indicates action, process or state. In Juan climbs the stairs, climbs up implies an action he is performing, in Ramón he has grown a lot, he has grown supposes a process that he has undergone, and in Ramón is tired, he is supposes a state.

Grammatical Accidents

In the vast majority of the world's languages, the verb is the most complex word class in the sense that it can reflect many more parts of speech than other words. It frequently expresses one or more grammatical persons (in languages such as Spanish it only marks the grammatical person associated with the subject; in other languages it can also mark the object), grammatical number, tense-mode-aspect and more rarely in some languages they may carry grammatical gender, evidential, directional, form classifiers, intentional, etc. In traditional grammar the categories expressed in the verb are called «grammatical accidents».

In most inflectional languages there are three typical grammatical categories of the verb.

• The verbal grammatical time category assumes different forms in different languages. In many European languages there are three possible values of time: present, past and future; in other languages the difference is between past and non-paste (present or future). There are even languages such as Chinese that do not have grammatical time, and the semantic notion of time is made by explicit adverbs (today, yesterday...) or contextually.
• The category of mode can include various variants, such as conditional, imperative, indicative, negative, optional, potential, subjunctive, etc.
• The grammatical aspect refers to the semantic notion of finished action (perfect), unfinished action (imperfect), continuous action, etc.

In many Indo-European languages, tense, aspect, and grammatical mood are frequently expressed fused by a single morpheme that simultaneously expresses the various values of those categories. For example, in Spanish, in the form amaste the morpheme -ste simultaneously expresses the indicative mood, the past tense and the perfect aspect (also to express second person and singular).

Morphological constituents

Verbs are a class of words with great formal variation among the languages of the world; They convey action, process, state, number, person, time, etc. The following morphological constituents of verb forms can be distinguished:

• Raíz: The root provides the lexical information. A verb may be composed of several roots, for example spoil has two, it is formed by Bad.-raising-Aar..
• Derivative morphemes: The derivative morphemes are concaten at the root; they can be both prefixes and suffixes; for example rebuild has the derivative prefix re-.

Inflectional languages and particularly Indo-European languages frequently also include other types of constituents:

• Disinences or bending morphemes providing grammatical information:
  • Number and person failure: In We were singing, the morphema - Let's go. indicates plural number and first person.
  • Desinence of time, appearance and mode: In We were singing-ba- indicates past time, imperfect aspect and indicative mode.
• Thematic speaker: The thematic vowel is a characteristic element of romance languages that lacks meaning and allows to classify verbs in conjugations. In Spanish, the verbs of the first conjugation present the thematic vowel -a- the second one.e- and the third one...i-.

In many Romance and Germanic languages there are compound verb forms. In the compound forms there is an auxiliary verb (in Spanish haber), which accompanies the participle of the conjugated verb, has no meaning and only conveys grammatical information. For example, in We have sung the action is expressed by the participle of sing. Other auxiliary verbs in Spanish are ser in its passive construction and the verbs used in verb periphrases.

Variation of number and person

In languages like Chinese or English, the verb has very few marks and there is hardly any verbal inflection. However, this situation is not the most common among the world's languages, and many non-isolating languages display a great deal of morphological variation in verb forms. Two of the most commonly expressed categories are grammatical number and grammatical person. The number indicates whether the verb form is singular, plural, dual, etc., and the person typically indicates whether the verb is in the first, second, or third person.

In Spanish, the verb forms that distinguish the person are personal forms, and the verb forms that do not express the person are non-personal forms, that is, the infinitive, the gerund, and the participle. In Spanish, Latin, the Romance languages, and other Indo-European languages, both the infinitive and the gerund have compound forms. But in the languages of the world there is great variation in marked forms.

Tense, Aspect, and Mood (TAM)

Grammatical tense is a category that refers to temporal reference (relative or absolute depending on the language), which allows us to locate the chronological order of events and actions. In inflectional languages, grammatical tense is usually reflected in a set of paradigms associated with a set of endings, which together are called tenses.

The grammatical tense indicates whether the action is past (before another), present (usual or simultaneous to another) or future (after another) in relation to the moment of speech (present). In the Indo-European languages, for example, the verb tenses, in addition to expressing the grammatical tense, properly speaking, also indicate the grammatical aspect and sometimes the grammatical mood and other related aspects but which do not strictly refer to the timeline of events.

Appearance

The aspect informs the perspective of the speaker before the development of the verbal action.

• The aspect is perfective when the forms of verbal conjugation express the end of the action, such as Roberto lived in Almeriaas the action of living is considered past and finished. In Spanish, all the composite forms and the simple perfect preterite look perfectivo.
• The aspect is imperfect when verbal forms do not express the end of the action, such as Roberto lived in Almeriaas the action of living it is considered past, but not finished regarding the rest of what is being said.

Mode

The mode informs about the attitude of the speaker before the verbal action. In Spanish, the verbal action is seen in three ways:

• Real: The verbal action exists. It corresponds to the indicative mode.
• Possible or virtual: Verbal action exists in the imagination of the speaker, who manifests an attitude of doubt, desire, fear, etc. about action. It corresponds to the subjunctive mode.
• Order or exhortation: Corresponds to the imperative mode.

Other categories

In addition to the categories commonly expressed in languages such as Spanish, other languages express a greater number of categories in the verb. For example, in Nahuatl the verb expresses not only the grammatical person of the subject or agent, but also includes ways to express the object or theme of the verbal action. In Semitic languages many verb forms express the grammatical gender of the subject. Many indigenous languages of the Americas and other places express categories that are absent from European languages, such as inclusiveness or evidentiality.

Verbal arguments

The arguments required by the verb include the subject and the verb objects. In various languages they are named differently but in general terms a transitive verb requires a direct object (occasionally regime object); some ditransitives also require an indirect object. The so-called circumstantial complement is not mandatory in any case, so it is syntactically an adjunct to the verb phrase.

Semantically, the direct object usually assumes a thematic role of patient or subject, while the indirect object usually receives a thematic role of beneficiary or recipient. In Spanish and other languages, some verbs require obligatory complements with different thematic roles or express this complement through a regime complement.

Circumstantial complements are not verbal arguments since they can be omitted, but when they are present they complete the meaning of the predication expressing mode, place, time, etc. These are adjuncts frequently introduced by adpositions or are carried out by adverbs of manner, time, and place.

Diathesis

The grammatical diathesis has to do with the number of arguments required by the verb or valence of the verb. Many verbs require only one argument (intransitives) whose thematic role is frequently an experimenter. Other verbs that require an agent among their arguments are often transitive and also require a patient or subject.

In Spanish some of the verbs that require an agent as one of their arguments can appear in transitive or intransitive diathesis:

I ate the chicken. (DT)

You were eating. (DI)

Other transitive verbs in Spanish are rigidly intransitive and do not admit this double diathesis:

Juan devoured the chicken (DT)

♪ John devoured (DI)

The second sentence is not directly interpretable without additional pragmatic inferences, since devour does not admit of an intransitive diathesis here.

The languages of the world present morphological procedures that can alter the valence of the verb between them:

• Passivation consists of the formation of an intransitive from a transient. Note that for example in Spanish the agent supplement, introduced by the preposition in a passive prayer is omissible, and therefore is a syntactic attachment: He was elected president It's grammatical as well as He was elected president by most of the camera. In the nominative-acusative languages this process of intransitivization is called passive voice formation, while in the energetic-absolutive languages this process is called antipastive voice formation.

• The causative voice.
• Applicative voice.

Syntax

In addition to syntactic order requirements, the occurrence of a verb in a sentence may be bound by grammatical agreement. This means that in many languages the verb is required to have one form or another depending on other syntactic constituents that precede or follow it.

In Spanish the verb agrees with the subject:

The boy ranor a lot.

The childs corrieron a lot.

On the other hand, in other languages such as Basque there is concordance between the subject and object:

ditt 'I got 'em.' dut 'I got it.'

ditgu 'We got 'em.' dugu 'We got it.'

The verb in the languages of the world

In traditional grammar, the verb is conceived as the main word of the predicate in the sentence. Since designating and predicating are basic functions of all human languages, all languages have verbs. Typically, many languages differentiate between two large classes of lexical categories: in the first would basically be the nouns and in the second the verbs, although in a few languages these classes are not disjoint. Adjectives in some languages are treated similarly to nouns and in others more similarly to stative verbs. Verbal predication typically includes a set of primary categories such as person, tense, aspect, and in many languages also secondary categories such as gender and number, although some of these categories may be missing in each particular language. For example, in Indo-European languages, unlike what happens in Semitic languages, the verb does not include gender distinctions.

The verb in Spanish

Graphical representation of the indicative verbal times

In Spanish, it constitutes the most inflexively variable word class and is made up of a lexeme, as well as morphemes of number and person in its periphery, and of manner, voice (active or passive), aspect, and thematic vowel infix between the lexeme and those. It admits derivative morphemes (affixes) of different meanings.

Depending on the type of language in question, verbs can vary in form. In addition, the verb can agree in gender, person and number with some of its arguments or complements (which are normally known as subject, object, etc.). In Spanish it always agrees with the subject in number and almost always in person (the exception is the case of the so-called inclusive subject: We Spaniards are like this), and quite often with the attribute of linking verbs.

Languages in which verbs are conjugated are called inflectional and each one determines a specific pattern of conjugation, which differs notably from one linguistic system to another. In the case of the Spanish language, which is inflectional, most verbs are conjugated regularly according to three unique patterns (conjugations) defined according to the thematic vowel (1st or in -ar, 2nd or in -er, 3rd or in -ir):

1.a conjugation: jump, walk, love, drag...

2.a conjugation: run, eat, fear, happen, want...

3.a conjugation: live, die, shake, go, exist...

The verb forms also vary according to their voice, according to whether they are personal or non-personal forms, according to the tense-mode-aspect, according to number and person (in Spanish these two categories are subject to agreement with the subject). Other less general conjugation patterns are called irregular verbs. Along with this type of conjugation, there is also another type of regular conjugation through analytical structures called verbal periphrases, which express more precise and specific modes and aspects that are not included in the regular conjugation, which is more general. Since the ending is different for each person, the use of subject pronouns is often considered redundant.

French and English

The verb presents reasonably common features in all Indo-European languages: conjugation based on person, number, and tense-mode-aspect, but not on gender, evidentiality, or the existence of derivation that changes type valence causative, applicative, etc. However, despite these widespread features, there are not insignificant differences in the verbal systems of the Indo-European languages.

In other languages, such as French, verbs have different endings for each person, but due to their particular spelling, many of them are homophones, so the pronoun is considered necessary. In English, a similar situation occurs, so in general an explicit subject is required.

Chinese and Japanese

In Chinese, the verb always has the same form and does not vary according to person, number, aspect, tense or voice. Both the aspect (perfect or imperfect), the tense (future) and the voice (passive) are expressed by auxiliary particles without affecting the form of the verb. The absence of person or agreement marks in the verb means that in every sentence without a lexical subject a tonic pronoun must appear to indicate the person.

Japanese verbs, on the other hand, don't conjugate with person or number, so expressions like nihongo no hon wo yondeimasu can be interpreted as "I'm reading a Japanese book.", "They are reading a Japanese book" or any person or number, depending on the context.

Also in Chinese, Japanese, and other languages, adjectives are actually stative verbs.

African languages

A significant number of African languages of the Niger-Congo family outside of the Bantu group are highly analytic^{[citation needed]} so similar to what happens In Chinese, the conjugation of the verbs is done using particles that can be understood as auxiliaries. This happens in both the Mandé and Yoruba languages.

Amerindian languages

Some Amerindian languages such as Nahuatl (Uto-Aztec family) or Xwlemi (Salish family) do not present a formal difference between nouns and verbs, and any root that functions as a noun can be conjugated according to the grammatical person. This situation is similar to that of Chinese where adjectives are in fact stative verbs, only that in several Amerindian languages common nouns can also be considered stative verbs.

Verb classes

Transitive and intransitive verbs

Syntactically, a verb with a transitive diathesis or transitive verb requires two participants: a subject and an object. On the contrary, intransitive verbs require a single participant that in nominative-accusative languages is characterized the same as the subject of transitives, with nominative case, while in ergative languages it is characterized the same as the object of transitives, with case. absolutive. The same verbal root can be intransitive in some sentences and transitive in other sentences. The following are examples in Spanish:

I'm eating. (intransitive)

I'm eating nuts. (transitive)

The transitive verbs are those that require the presence of a direct object (also called «direct object») to have a complete meaning; that is, they refer to actions that transit from the actor to the object (see transitivity). An example of this category in Spanish is:

I got two tickets for the opera..

Here, the group consisting of “two opera tickets” represents the direct object. The construction "I have achieved..." does not make sense by itself, and requires that information be provided about what is achieved. As a general rule, transitive verbs are of the form "someone does something to something".

The intransitive verbs are divided into inaccusatives and inergatives depending on whether the argument they take is agent-type or patient-type. In many languages, including Old Spanish, this division is very clearly manifested in the auxiliary. Thus, inergative verbs use the verb to have in the perfect forms, while inaccusative verbs use the verb to be:

Desque were arrived the messengers of Montezuma to the shore of the sea, entering in the canoes (Bernardino de Sahagún).

Although this distinction is no longer active in Spanish, the difference between inaccusatives and inergatives is manifested in the morphological derivation, in transitivity alternations or in certain syntactic constructions such as absolute constructions. In the latter case, only unaccusative verbs are compatible with this construction: once the train has arrived versus *once the dog has barked.

Regular and irregular verbs

The irregular verbs are those that have particular conjugations. Morphological irregularities of any kind are more common in fusional languages, less so in agglutinatives, and practically non-existent in isolators.

The regular verbs are, on the contrary, those that adhere closely to the paradigms or models of conjugation most used in the language.

Irregular verbs in Spanish

In Spanish, irregularities are differentiated into the so-called primitive tenses, which are the present of the indicative mood («Yo quepo»), the simple past tense of the indicative («Yo cupe») and the future simple in the same way ("Yo cabré"); it is possible to determine if a verb is irregular or not by conjugating it in those three tenses and seeing if it adheres to the conjugation rules to which the other verbs adapt.

In Spanish, the irregularity of any simple verb is generally maintained in the conjugation of the verbs derived from it, although there are exceptions. Examples:

• Do: Undo, satisfy, redo, etc.
• Put: compose, decompose, replenish, etc.

Among the exceptions, the most common is the one seen in the derivatives of the verb «to say» («curse» and «bless»), which in the future of the indicative mood are not conjugated as I will curse and I will bless (which is what would be assumed according to the rule) but I will curse and bless.

The regular verbs are those that closely adhere to the conjugation patterns. In Spanish there are three of these paradigms: the first conjugation, whose infinitives end in -ar; the second, where they end in -er and the third, where they end in -ir. Within the regular conjugation, an extended conjugation can also be considered by means of verbal periphrases that indicate different types of aspect and verbal mode.

Impersonal verbs in Spanish

In Spanish, a distinction is made between proper impersonal verbs (also called unipersonal), and improper verbs.

• Them impersonal verbs of their own are verbs that, in their original sense (i.e. non-metrophoric) are conjugated only in the 3.a person. This category is composed of the so-called “temporary verbs” or “climatic” (♪, Nievaetc.). These verbs are intransitive.

• Them impropriety impersonal verbs, on the contrary, they are verbs that although in some contexts they have a normal conjugation, they can be used as impersonal (hence their category of impropios). For example: the verb «do» can be used in contexts such as:

«Spartac does its tasks».

or in phrases like

It's hot.; years agoin singular.

In this second example it is being used as an impersonal verb. Improper impersonal verbs in Spanish are:

• Make: There are things to do. There are heroes for all tastes
• Do: It's so hot.
• Enough (in its form) enough + preposition(c): Stop talking.
• Being: It's night..
• Go: It went well on the test. or It went well in the game..

Terciopersonal verbs in Spanish

They are verbs that are generally only conjugated in the third person singular or plural, such as happen (something happens, things happen >, but normally neither I nor we nor you nor you perform that action). Most of these verbs, for logical reasons, refer to meteorological phenomena.

Examples: rain, thunder, hail, lightning, flood, snow.

→ Sentences with meteorological verbs have no subject. Example: Last night it rained very hard.

Defective verbs in Spanish

The defective verbs are those in which the complete conjugation paradigm is not fulfilled. For these verbs there are no conjugations in some tenses and persons, mainly due to reasons of euphony or usage.

Some examples of defective verbs in Spanish are:

• Some verbs are defective because they need for their meaning a subject of thing and therefore they only have third person forms. This is the case of verbs to or It happens.: we cannot say ♪ it happened ♪but only It happens. or It happens.
• Other verbs are defective because they name phenomena of nature and usually do not carry subject. That's the case. rain, snow, sunset and others, who only have forms of third person: It rains, it's snowed, it'll strike.

In Latin the meteorological verbs (pluit 'it rains', tonat 'it thunders', fulgurat 'relampaguea', ninguit 'neva', are defective, although so are verbs that express duty or necessity (libet & #39;pleases', licet 'it is lawful', decet 'it is proper', dedecet 'it is not suitable', oportet 'it is necessary', refert 'it matters', etc.) and others that express feelings (piget 'have pity', poenitet 'repent', miseret 'have compassion', etc.).

Linking verbs in Spanish

In Spanish the linking verbs are ser, estar, parecer, as well as other verbs that in certain contexts are linking, such as resultar, seguir, semejar, resemble, remain, continue.

They are the verbs that do not provide a full meaning, they are only used to unite the subject and the predicate. They are those verbs that have a minimal meaning, so that their presence or absence does not change the meaning of the subject and therefore they are almost dispensable (saying "the house is blue" would practically say the same thing as saying "The blue house"); For this reason, instead of selecting direct objects affected by the verb, a different type of complements called sentence attributes govern, which are mutable or replaceable by the unstressed pronoun «lo». Sentence attributes can be of two types:

• Subjectives, that is, to determine the core of the subject;
• Predictive, that is, they determine a member of the preacher. These preaching supplements are also called.

In the morphosyntactic analysis, the attributes are marked as determinants both of the verb that governs it and of what it determines, whether this is in the subject or in the predicate. It is important to note that not only linking verbs require attributes.

Tenses and verb modes in Spanish

In Spanish, the verb forms are grouped into different tenses and three modes. In addition to three impersonal forms, which have no tense or mode: the infinitive, the participle, and the gerund. The three existing modes are the indicative mode, the subjunctive mode and the imperative mode, in which there are different verb forms:

(Using the verb «to love» as an example)

• Staff
  • Indicative mode:
    • PresentMaster, love, love, love...) / Perfect Pretérito Composed (I have loved, you have loved, loved...)
    • Pretérito Imperfecto (Amaba) / Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto (Haby loved)
    • Perfect Preterito Simple (Ame) / Preterito Previous (Hube Loved)
    • Future Imperfect (Amar) / Perfect Future (I have loved)
    • Conditional Imperfect (Amaria) / Conditional Perfect (I would have loved)
  • Subjunctive mode:
    • Present (Ame) / Perfect Prefect (Beloved Beloved)
    • Pretérito Imperfecto (Amara or amase) / Pretérito Pluscuamperfecto (Hubiera, [or had] loved)
    • Future Imperfect (Amare) / Perfect Future (Beloved)
  • imperative mode
    • You (Ama)
    • Vos (Amá)
    • You (Ame)
    • We (Friends)
    • You (Amad)
    • You (Amen)
• Non-Personnel
  • Infinitive Simple (Amar) / Infinitive Composed (Beloved)
  • Participle (Amado)
  • Gerundio Simple (Amando) / Composed Gerundio (Having Beloved)

Type of process (Aktionsart)

Zeno Vendler proposed that verbs can also be classified semantically, according to the type of process they denote.

• State (static and athelic): be, be alive
• Activities (dynamic and athelic): walking, running
• Achievements or events (technical and instantaneous): birth, flowering
• Realisations (technical, temporary duration): convince, reach...