[MUSIC] According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, here's the 25 most commonly
used verbs in English. The editors of this dictionary
offer these observations. Strikingly, the 25 most frequent
verbs are all one syllable words. The first two syllable verbs are become,
that's the 26th word, and include, the 27th. Furthermore, 20 of those
25 are old English words. And three more, get, see, and want, entered English from Old Norse
in the early Medieval period. Only try and use came from Old French. It seems that English prefers concise,
ancient words to describe actions and occurrences. When we talk about the different
kinds of verbs, it generally makes most sense to defined them by what
they do rather than by what they are. Just as the same word measure or increase,
for example, can serve as either a noun or a verb, the same verb can play a number of
different roles depending on the context. There are three basic types of verbs
in the English language, lexical verbs, finite verbs, auxiliary, and modal verbs. Lexical verbs can stand alone. Lexical verbs have meanings denoting
actions, events, and states. Auxiliary verbs, such as be, do, have add
extra information to the lexical verb. For example, auxiliary be is
used to Indicate continuous or progressive aspect and passive voice. Auxiliary do is used in
the creation of interrogative, negative, and emphatic structures. Auxiliary have is used to
indicate perfect aspect. Auxiliary verbs are usually followed by a
lexical verb as in the previous examples. Core members of modal verbs are can,
could, may, might, shall, should, will, would, and must. Modal verbs generally encode meanings
connected with degrees of certainty and degrees of necessity. A finite verb or a lexical verb is
a form of a verb that has a subject and can function as the base
of an independent clause, which stands alone as a complete sentence. In many languages finite verbs serve to
present grammatical information of person, number, tense, aspect, mood, and/or voice. Broadly speaking, finite verb is the verb
in a sentence that shows the tense. Finite verbs have the following
grammatical categories, person, first, second, or third. For example, I/we, you, second person,
he/she/it/they, third person. Number, for example, they can be
singular or plural or dual, tense, for example, present, past, and future,
aspect, simple, perfect, continuous, mood, indicative, subjunctive, or imperative,
and voice, active or passive. Finite verbs are distinguished from
nonfinite verbs such as infinitives, participles, and gerunds do not
indicate person, number, or tense. The distinction between finite and
nonfinite verbs is a very important one in grammar since it affects
how verbs behave in sentences. And this table shows basic examples for
finite and nonfinite verbs. A non-finite verb is any of several
verb forms that are not finite verbs. That is, they cannot serve as
the base of an independent sentence. Because English, to a large extent,
lacks inflectional morphology, the finite and nonfinite forms of a verb
might appear the same in a given context. In such a case, the environment
surrounding the verb must be examined to determine whether
it is finite or nonfinite. Sentences 2 and
4 each contain one finite verb. They're underlined, and nonfinite verbs,
participle studying, and infinitive to approach. In greater detail, we'll speak about
nonfinite verbs later in this module. Most verbs are active verbs. When an action verb is used, something,
the agent, acts upon something, the goal, sometimes for
something else, the participant. The terms agent, goal, and recipient describe the function
of a word in a sentence. Most action verbs are transitive and
have both an agent and a goal, although the agent is often
omitted in the passive voice. Very few verbs are truly intransitive,
meaning they have no goal and cannot be followed by a direct object. Many intransitive verbs also have
a transitive form or are used with a prepositional phrase or adverb that
could be considered as indirect object. The temperature increased. The verb is intransitive. This conclusion requires
additional consideration. The verb is transitive
because it has an object. We listened to the interviews, required
prepositional phrase, to the interviews. Let's consider more example. The experiment started. The verb is intransitive,
it doesn't take an object. We started the experiment. In this case the verb is transitive
because we started the experiment, experiment is the object. There is a difference in meaning
between these sentences. When the verb started is intransitive,
we started the experiment, there is a human agent that causes
the experiment, the goal to start. The experiment appears to start by
itself when the verb is intransitive. The experiment started. Using a non-human agent can be very
useful if you write in a discipline that discourages the use of
personal pronouns our and we. Reporting verbs describe what people say,
think, feel, or want. Although they're commonly
followed by noun phrases, other complements are possible
with certain verbs.
