VERBS - Basic English Grammar - What is a VERB? - Types of VERBS - Regular/Irregular - State, Action

Hi and welcome back to our series of lessons on the parts of speech

My name is Ganesh and this lesson is all about verbs. In this lesson I will teach

you the different types of verbs that we have in English and I'll also show you how to

avoid some common mistakes that students make with verbs. We will start with state

and action verbs, and then we'll look at main and helping verbs, and then we'll

turn to regular and irregular verbs, and finally we'll discuss transitive and

intransitive verbs. Now before we begin as always if you have any questions at

all you just have to let me know in the comments section and I'll talk to you

there.

OK so first of all what is a verb?

Well a verb is just a word that shows an action or a state - state means a

situation. And actually those are the two types of verbs - we call them state verbs

and action verbs. Sometimes they're called stative and dynamic verbs but the

meaning is the same.

OK what's the difference between these two? The difference is that action verbs

express physical activities or processes. For example verbs like kick, shout, run,

climb, stand, sit, grow - all of these show us physical activities or processes. But

a state verb is a verb that expresses a situation - for example, verbs like be, have,

think, like and own are all state verbs. Now when I say "I have a large family" - here

I'm using the state verb 'have'. That means I'm not talking about doing any physical

action.

I'm just telling you about a situation - in this case about my family. Or if I

said "Julia likes chocolate ice cream." Is Julia doing any action in that

sentence?No, that sentence just gives you some information about Julia. We're

still using a verb - like - but it's a state verb

Why is this difference important? And is it important at all? It is.

Because there's an important rule in English that you should know and that

rule is state verbs cannot be used in -ing forms. When you want to use a

continuous form, you can only do that with action verbs. Let's look at a couple

of examples. Now we can say "The children are playing in the park" or "Who's shouting?"

Both of these sentences are correct because the verbs play and shout are

physical actions, so we can use -ing forms. But we cannot say "I'm having a large

family." or "Julia is liking chocolate ice cream." Both of those sentences are wrong

They're common mistakes that some students make - some students use -ing forms with

state verbs. Please don't make that mistake, and remember: no continuous forms

with state verbs.

OK let's now move on and talk about main and helping verbs. These are

sometimes called auxiliary verbs as well. When a verb is used in a sentence,

it can be used in two ways - it can either be used as the main verb of the sentence

or it can be a helping verb - that is it can help the main verb. The most

important helping verbs are be, do and have. Let's look at some examples with

these: "Luciano is working now." In this sentence there are two verbs - can you tell me

which are the two verbs? 'Is' and 'working' are the two verbs. Which is the main verb?

The main verb is 'working' because that shows the action that is happening. Wo

what about 'is'? What is it doing? 'Is' is a helping verb - that shows the tense of

sentence. We know that Luciano is working now because we said 'is'. If I said

"Luciano was working", you know I'm talking about the past. So that helping verb is

showing the tense, and that's one of the things that helping verbs can do. They

can also help us to form negative sentences. For example "Luciano isn't

working now" or questions - "I Is Luciano working now?" In all three of these

sentences, the helping verb is 'be' or 'to be'. We're saying 'is' but that's just a form

of the verb 'to be' - we say 'I am', 'you are', 'he is', 'she is, etc. The verbs 'do' and 'have' can

also be helping verbs. For example, "I don't play golf every weekend" - maybe I'm

talking to my friends and my friends say "Hey you play golf every weekend right?"

and I say "No I don't play golf every weekend - I play tennis" for example, so

'don't' is 'do not'

That's the negative form of the verb 'do' and it helps me to make a negative, or my

friends could ask 'Do you play golf every weekend?"

That's a question. Let's look at an example with the verb 'have' - "We have

visited the UK four times" - here we know that the main verb is 'visited' but can

you tell me what is the purpose of using 'have' in this sentence? Now if I told you

"We visited the UK last year" - in that sentence, I'm talking about one single

experience - that is my visit last year. But when I say "We have visited the UK

four times" then I'm not talking about any single experience but I'm talking

about life experience - that is in our lives we have visited the UK four times.

That's what the verb 'have' helps us to do in this sentence.

OK so that's how 'be', 'do' and 'have' are used as helping verbs but take a look at

this next sentence - "We have a car."

Now both of these sentences use the verb 'have' but do you notice a difference

between them?

The difference is that the first sentence uses 'have' as a helping verb but

the second sentence uses 'have' as the main verb. You might be thinking how is

that possible? Because 'have' is a helping verb right?

True but in some cases 'be', 'do' and 'have' can be used as main verbs. Now in this

sentence 'have' is used to mean 'own' - "We own a car" is what I'm saying.

So in that way in some cases these can be used as main verbs but most of the

time they're used as helping verbs. Another type of helping verb is modals.

Modals are these words - can, could, may, might, will, would, shall, should and must.

I'm sure you know these words and I'm sure you use these a lot too. Modals help

us to express mood in a sentence.

What is mood? In grammar, mood means the attitude of the speaker - that is the

feeling I want to convey to you.

For example, if I said "The Patriots might win the super bowl this year." If you don't

know what that means the Super Bowl is an American football tournament in the

US and the New England Patriots are a team - so I'm making a prediction about

the future and I'm using modal verb 'might' to do that. Try to read that

sentence without 'might' - "The Patriots win the super bowl this year."

It sounds like I'm 100% sure. But that's not what I want to say - I want to

say that I maybe 70% sure.

OK so I'm using 'might'. So 'might' adds that mood to the sentence - that I'm talking about

possibility in the future. 'Modals' can also express ability, like "My sister can

play the guitar." In that sentence 'play' is

the main verb and 'can' shows ability. Or if I said "You mustn't smoke here" - what's

the mood I'm trying to convey? I'm using the modal verb 'must' in the negative - must

not - to show that you don't have permission

"You mustn't smoke here." So in that way modals help us to express mood in a

sentence.

Alright so that's our discussion of main and helping verbs. Let's now move on and

talk about regular and irregular verbs. To understand these you need to know a

little bit of background information, and that is that in English only verbs can

have tenses. Of course you know about past tense, present tense and future tense but

to make tenses, we change the forms of verbs.

Do you know how many forms of verbs are in English? There are five forms - we call

these the infinitive or the base form, the present tense form, the past tense

form, the past participle form - this form is used in some tenses and it's also

used in conditionals, and in the passive voice, so it's an important form. And then

we have the -ing or the continuous form. Let's take the example of a regular verb

'to cook' - its present tense forms are 'cook' and 'cooks' - that's because we say I, you, we,

they cook but he, she or it cooks. The past tense form is 'cooked', the past

participle form is also 'cooked' and the -ing form is 'cooking'. We say that this is

a regular verb because both the past tense form and the past participle forms

are just -ed endings - cooked. But you cannot do that with an irregular verb like the

verb 'to go' - the present tense forms are 'go' and 'goes' but the past tense form is

not goed - it's 'went'. The past participle form is 'gone'. Or take the verb 'to be'

It has three present tense forms - 'am', 'is' and 'are'. 'I am', 'you are' 'he is', 'she is'. And two past

tense forms - 'was' and 'were' and the past participle form is 'been'. Here's one last

example - the verb 'to read'. Its past tense and past participle forms are spelled read

but pronounced red like the color red.

So you might be thinking - how can I guess the past and past participle forms

of irregular verbs?

Well the answer is you cannot and that's what it means when we say that a verb is

irregular - there's no rule for making the two past and past participle forms. You

just have to learn them through experience. So it's a good idea for you

to go to your dictionary or to your coursebook and try to learn as many

irregular verbs as you can. Because that will help you to use English without

making mistakes.

Alright let's now move on to our final type of verb - that is transitive and

intransitive verbs. Have you heard of these before?

Well they're actually really easy but they're also important because a lot of

students make mistakes in this area. A transitive verb is just a verb that

takes an object.

What do I mean by object? Do you know? In grammar the object of a verb is a noun

that is, a person, place, animal or thing that receives the action of the verb. And a

transitive verb always takes an object.

OK I know you might be feeling really confused now - what does all this mean?

So I'll show you a couple of examples to help you understand this concept. Now if

I said "Duncan kicked" - does that sound a little wrong? Because you might ask me

Duncan kicked what? and I would have to say something like oh sorry "Duncan

kicked the ball" for example. 'The ball' is the object of

verb 'kick' because 'the ball' receives the 'kick' and the verb 'kick' is a transitive

verb - it always needs an object. Some other common are transitive verbs are

hit, give, carry, climb, make, kiss and take. With all of these, if you ask the

questions 'who' or 'what' you will get an answer.

Duncan kicked what? The ball. "I made a cake." I made what? A cake. "She kissed Pablo."

She kissed who?

Pablo. So that's how you know that these are all

transitive verbs. What about intransitive verbs then? Can you tell me what it means

to be an intransitive verb?

Well that's a verb that does not take an object. For example, verbs like live, die,

laugh, cry, run, sleep, sit, stand - these are all

intransitive verbs. They don't take objects. For example "The old man laughed

loudly." Notice that in this sentence there is no object.

We're saying the old man laughed but then 'loudly' is not a person or thing

receiving the action - that's just an adverb that gives us information about

'laughed'. So if you ask the questions 'The old man laughed who" or "The old man laughed

what?" - you will get no answer.

That's how you know that that verb is intransitive. OK I told you that students make

mistakes with these. What kinds of mistakes do they make? Well the most common

mistake is that students often leave out the object with a transitive verb. For

example students say "The thief climbed and then escaped." Can you identify the error

in that sentence? Well, the mistake is that the verb 'climb' is a transitive verb and

you need to say climbed what? You need to say an object. Now in your mind you might

have a picture

of a thief climbing over a wall and then running away but you need to say

that. You need to say "The thief climbed over the wall and then escaped." So don't

make that mistake of leaving out the object after a transitive verb

OK let's now quickly recap what we've learned today. We started with state and

action verbs - remember that state verbs show situations and you don't use -ing

forms with state verbs. Then we spoke about main and helping verbs.. 'Be', 'do'

and 'have' are the most important helping or auxiliary verbs but sometimes they can

be used as main verbs in a sentence. Modals are another type of helping verb

and they help us to show mood - that's things like possibility, ability or

permission. Then we turned to regular and irregular verbs. The past and past

participle forms of irregular verbs cannot be guessed, so you have to learn

them through experience. And finally we spoke about

transitive verbs which take an object and intransitive verbs which do not take

an object. Do you remember the common mistake that I shared with you? The

common mistake is leaving out objects with transitive verbs - don't make that

mistake.

Alright I hope you enjoyed this lesson. I'll see you in the next lesson.