This article needs attention from an expert on the subject. See the talk page for details. WikiProject Linguistics or the Linguistics Portal may be able to help recruit an expert. (November 2008)
This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2006)
Examples

• I washed the car yesterday.
• The equation looked confusing.
• John studies English and French.

In syntax, a verb, deriving from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word (part of speech) that conveys action (bring, read, walk, run, murder), or a state of being (exist, stand). In most languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender, and/or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.

Agreement

In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (what we tend to call the subject) in person, number and/or gender. With the exception of the verb to be, English shows distinctive agreement only in the third person singular, present tense form of verbs, which, in regular verbs, is marked by adding "-s" (I walk, he walks). The rest of the persons are not distinguished in the verb (I walk, you walk, they walk, etc.).

Latin and the Romance languages inflect verbs for tense/mood/aspect and they agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish) with the subject. Japanese, in turn, inflects verbs for many more categories, but shows absolutely no agreement with the subject. Basque, Georgian, and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object and even the secondary object if present.

Valency

The number of arguments that a verb takes is called its valency or valence. Verbs can be classified according to their valency:

• Intransitive (valency = 1): the verb only has a subject. For example: "he runs", "it falls".
• Transitive (valency = 2): the verb has a subject and a direct object. For example: "she eats fish", "we hunt nothing".

In English, it is impossible to have verbs with zero valency. Weather verbs are often impersonal (subjectless) in null-subject languages like Spanish, where the verb llueve means "It rains". In English, they require a dummy pronoun, and therefore formally have a valency of 1.^{[dubious – discuss]}

The intransitive and transitive are typical, but the impersonal and objective are somewhat different from the norm. In this sense you can see that a verb is a person, place, thing, or link. In the objective the verb takes an object but no subject, the nonreferent subject in some uses may be marked in the verb by an incorporated dummy pronoun similar to the English weather verb (see below). Impersonal verbs take neither subject nor object, as with other null subject languages, but again the verb may show incorporated dummy pronouns despite the lack of subject and object phrases. Tlingit lacks a ditransitive, so the indirect object is described by a separate, extraposed clause.^{[citation needed]}

English verbs are often flexible with regard to valency. A transitive verb can often drop its object and become intransitive; or an intransitive verb can take an object and become transitive.

In the first example, the verb move has no grammatical object. (In this case, there may be an object understood – the subject (I/myself). The verb is then possibly reflexive, rather than intransitive); in the second the subject and object are distinct. The verb has a different valency, but the form remains exactly the same.

In many languages other than English, such valency changes are not possible like this; the verb must instead be inflected in order to change the valency.^{[citation needed]}

Verbal noun and verbal adjective

Most languages have a number of verbal nouns that describe the action of the verb. In Indo-European languages, there are several kinds of verbal nouns, including gerunds, infinitives, and supines. English has gerunds, such as seeing, and infinitives such as to see; they both can function as nouns; seeing is believing is roughly equivalent in meaning with to see is to believe. These terms are sometimes applied to verbal nouns of non-Indo-European languages.

In the Indo-European languages, verbal adjectives are generally called participles. English has an active participle, also called a present participle; and a passive participle, also called a past participle. The active participle of break is breaking, and the passive participle is broken. When used adjectivally, the active participle describes nouns that perform the action given in the verb, e.g. I heard the sound of breaking glass. The passive participle describes nouns that have been the object of the action of the verb, e.g. I saw the broken glass scattered across the floor.

Other languages have attributive verb forms with tense and aspect. This is especially common among verb-final languages, where attributive verb phrases act as relative clauses.

See also

• Linguistics

Verbs in different languages

• Ancient Greek verbs
• Basque verbs
• Bulgarian verbs
• Chinese verbs
• English verbs
• Finnish verb conjugation
• French verbs
• German verbs
• Germanic verbs
• Hebrew verb conjugation
• Hungarian verbs
• Ilokano verbs
• Irish verbs
• Japanese consonant and vowel verbs
• Japanese verb conjugations
• Korean verbs
• Latin verbs
• Persian verbs
• Portuguese verb conjugation
• Proto-Indo-European verb
• Romance verbs
• Romanian verbs
• Sanskrit verbs
• Sesotho verbs
• Slovene verbs
• Spanish verbs
• Tigrinya verbs

Grammar

• Grammar
• Grammatical aspect
• Grammatical mood
• Grammatical tense
• Grammatical voice
• Performative utterance
• Phrase structure rules
• Sentence (linguistics)
• Syntax
• Transitivity (grammatical category)
• Verb argument
• Verb framing
• Verbification
• Verb phrase

Other

• Le Train de Nulle Part: A 233-page book without a single verb.

Lexical categories and their features
Noun
Verb

Adjective
Adverb
Pronoun