I was reading the long, drawn out explanations of verbs in the Parrott book. It made me reconsider my original simple definition of a verb: an action word. But that definition does not give a verb justice. There are many types of verbs and many forms and many uses. It is not fair to say that verbs exist in a sentence in order to express action. I like the quote written in Anderson's book,
"The verb is the heartthrob of the sentence. Without a verb, a group of words can never hope to be anything more than a fragment, a hopelessly incomplete sentence, a eunuch or dummy of a grammatical expression."
In reference to modal verbs, I was trying to make a comparison of modal verbs in English with those of Spanish and Italian. In the Latin-based languages I mentioned would the modal verbs be "dober / dovere" (to have to)"poder / potere" (to be able to) and "querer / volere" (to want to)?
2 comments:
Hey Maria! I loved your blog on verbs. As I was reading it, I couldn't help to think how you had such a deep thought about verbs. You never know maybe one day you can publish a book about verbs. See you in class. -Lanna
Good comments on verbs. You have had a very profound thought about them that will lead straight into our class discussion on them on Tuesday. Classifying verbs as action vs being is an inadequate way to handle verbs.
It has been interesting reading about your impressions of the textbook. Feel free to branch out to any interesting everyday subjects.
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