3 Verbs

The discussion of verbs will continue in Chapter 2. For now, I’ll offer a brief introduction. It only scratches the surface, but it will be enough to help you navigate sentences.

To begin, verbs are one of the three required components of a sentence. If a group of words doesn’t include a verb, there’s no sentence.

You probably already know that verbs express actions, and that’s true, but verbs do more than that. We’re going to discuss three major types of verbs: action verbs, linking verbs, and helping verbs.

Action Verbs

Like the name implies, action verbs express an action, something that someone does.

Many action verbs express physical actions that you can picture in your mind: run, jump, drive, throw, etc.

Other action verbs are not quite as easy to picture, but they’re still actions; they’re still things people do:  purchase, love, ponder, compare, etc.

Teresa challenges her father to a chess match every afternoon. During the game, she captures his bishop as soon as possible.

The words underlined in the sentence are both action verbs. They express two things that Teresa does: challenge and capture.

Linking Verbs

Sometimes sentences don’t really express an action; instead, the writer just wants to provide information about something. English grammar doesn’t allow us to write sentences without a verb, though, so we use something called a linking verb. You can’t picture linking verbs in your head; they’re not really expressing an action. Instead, linking verbs bridge the gap between the subject of a sentence (ie., the focus) and the information about the subject. Let’s look at an example:

Diet Coke is delicious and refreshing.

In this sentence, we don’t really have an action. Instead we have a subject (Diet Coke) and a group of words giving us information about the subject (delicious and refreshing). The word between those two parts — is — is a linking verb. It connects those two parts of the sentence.

Helping Verbs (aka Auxiliary Verbs)

If you ever want to change the tense of a verb, or express it in passive voice (more on that in Chapter #), you will likely need to use helping verbs. Helping verbs are never the main verb in a sentence. They are instead placed in front of the main (action) verb, like this:

Cillian Murphy will be playing Oppenheimer.     (the action playing will happen in the future)

Don’t move my papers from the table.   (shows that the speaker is commanding the reader)

Jing will have run three marathons by June.  (the action run will be complete by a point in the future)

The main helping verbs are to be, to have, and to do.