Total: 100/____ § 1 meaning and creation of verbs

I. General meaning

Verbs are words that express a physical or mental action (This machine cleans carpets. She hopes for the best) or a state of being (She is a student).

Without a verb, it is usually impossible to make a sentence in English. On the other hand, a sentence can be made of only one word if it is a verb: Read!

II. Verb creation

Verbs can be simple (read, run), derived (endanger, intensify) or composite (sit down, give up).

1. Simple verbs (get, go, come, take, give, etc.) make up the core of the English verbal system: most of them are native and most frequently used words.

Some of these verbs are differentiated from their historically related nouns or adjectives by means of a sound alteration in the root. The change may affect the root vowel (food n– feed v), root consonant (speech n – speak v), or both (life n – live v).

There are many verbs in Modern English that were borrowed from Latin and French together with their verb-building suffixes (e.g. -ate/ -ute) as dictate, pollute. Now these verbs are simple because their roots do not have homonymous free words with the same meaning in Modern English (*dict, *poll).

S ome simple dissyllabic verbs borrowed from French retain the stress on the second syllable while their homographic nouns, which have become more assimilated in English, are already forestressed: to re´cord (v) – a ´record (n), to pre´sent (v) – a ´present (n) (See Ch.1, Unit 1).

2. Derived verbs make up the majority of the English verbal system.

Derivation of verbs is mostly done by means of prefixes attached to:

a) verbal bases:

re- (‘to repeat an action’): to reread, to reconsider;

under- (‘to do too little’): to underestimate, to undercook;

over-(‘to do too much’): to overestimate, to overcook;

un- (‘to act contrary to that of the simple stem’): to unload, to uncover;

dis- (‘to negate the action’): to disconnect, to disagree;

de- (‘to do the opposite’, ‘to undo the action’) – used in many neologisms: to demobilize, to devalue, to deactivate;

mis- (‘to act wrongly, badly’): to misunderstand, to miscalculate;

b) adjectival bases:

en- (‘to bring into a certain condition or a state’): to enrich, to enable

c) nominal or adjectival bases:

be- (‘to make a thing or quality’): to befriend, to belittle.

Derivation of verbs by suffixes is less common in English. The most common verbal suffixes are usually added to:

a) adjectival bases:

-fy/-ify: to falsify, to purify;

-en: to widen, to shorten;

b) nominal bases:

-ize, -ise: to cryslalize, to patronise;

Some verbs are derived by conversion – an affixless way of word formation. Such verbs look simple and usually denote ‘an action highly characteristic of the object’ (to monkey, to fool), ‘an action with the object’ (to knife, to water), ‘an acquisition or deprivation of the object’ (to milk, to dust, to fish) or ‘an action leading to a certain state or quality’ (to empty, to dirty, to clean).

3. Complex verbs (give up, outgrow) are viewed as phrasal or composite verbs.

A phrasal verb is a multi-word verb consisting of a verb followed by one or more particles and having a meaning larger than the meaning of each of its constituent (drink up 'выпить до дна', put up with 'примириться').

Some phrasal verbs are used in sentences without a direct object: You have to stay up late tonight.

Some phrasal verbs may be followed by a noun or pronoun: He looked after the baby. He looked after him.

Some verbs in phrasal constructions may be followed by a noun or pronoun and then by a particle: He answered John back. He answered him back.

The number of phrasal verbs in English has remarkably grown in the last century. They constitute one of the most distinctive features of English grammar. There are thousands of them now and they require a lot of memory work on the part of a learner. (Some of them are presented in Unit 7, § 8 in this book.)

As for compound verbs, the situation is rather complicated.

Some verbs as outgrow, overflow, snowball, or housekeep are often called compound. But many other scholars deny word compounding in verbs and view such verbs either derivatives either by means of prefixation (outgrow, overflow), conversion (to snowball (v) from a snowball (n)) or back-formation (housekeep (v) from housekeeper (n)).

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