If we’re going to spend the merry, merry month of May talking about verbs, it’d be pretty useful to have some working vocabulary, right? I’ll be the first to admit that though I have a degree in Linguistics with a minor in English, I can never keep “intransitive” and “transitive” straight. Even a Word Nerd can learn some new tricks (although I’m sure Annette does know these terms 😉 ). And yes, we’re going to start really simple—although I’m sure you already intuitively know most of this stuff!
The following are all properties of verbs:
Tense expresses when the action occurred. Past tense, for example, means the action happened in the past. (Told you we’d start simple!)
Person and number determine how we conjugate the verb: the first person, plural, form of “to walk” (present tense) is “walk” as in “we walk.” (English verbs are tricky, since I walk, you walk, we walk, y’all walk, they walk. Only he, she and it walks 😉 .) Because we like everyone to get along, verbs must agree in person and number—the conjugated form of the verb must match the subject. None of that “I walks” stuff.
Voice can have this really long, technical definition, but let’s just put it this way: voice tells us if the subject of the sentence is doing the action or being acted upon. And there’s a great example in that sentence there: the guy IS DOING the action is active voice. The guy IS BEING ACTED upon is passive voice—the guy, the subject of the sentence, isn’t doing anything.
Aspect can indicate an ongoing action: this is the “progressive” tenses—I am walking vs. I walk.
Mood is complicated (and not just because I’m a woman). If you know what the word “subjunctive” means, good for you! That’s a mood. And that’s all I’m gonna say.
Transitive and intransitive are two verb classes that tell us whether or not the verb will have an object. Okay, say it with me now: transitive verbs take objects (the thieves!). Transitive verbs transfer the action of the verb to something later in the sentence. For example:
Transitive: Joe took the bicycle. (The bicycle is the object.)
Intransitive: Joe died. (Don’t steal bad, bad Leroy Brown’s bike, dude.)
When this gets messed up . . . it’s pretty funny:
Transitive abuse: Joe took. (Yeah, okay, sometimes it could work where the object is understood, but not in isolation like this.)
Intransitive abuse: Joe died the bicycle. (He did what now?)
And now for the finale: the ones you’re going to want to remember for future posts here are tense, voice, and (in)transitive. They just seemed lonely without the full complement of verb qualities 😉 .
