The english verb

I ty r, THE nf � ENGLISH -VERB y ;r l· ! ,h '5, re Fr t en, w' }r second· edition L{ H h F R PALM JR < l' -y T h i 1" e ) , � "la � td •t; , , r e ver mi� tm "T re de re , §, ���====================�� ======��==� al 11 LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY THE ENGLISH VERB Second Edition LONGMAN LINGUISTICS LIBRARY General editors: R H R O B INS, GEOFFREY DAVID University of London H O R R OCKS, University of Cambridge DENISON, University of Manchester For a complete list of books in the series see pages v and vi The English Verb Second Edition F R Palmer LONGMAN LONDON AND NEW YORK Addison We.ley Longman Limited Edinburgh Gate, Harlow, Essex CM20 2JE, England and Associated Companies throughout the world Published in the United States of America by Addison Wesley Longman Inc., New York © F R Palmer 1965 This edition [...]... 3 I I are the imperatives (the forms used in requests and commands) The imperatives only partly follow the pattern of the other verbal forms THE VERB PHRASE There is no place here for the traditional paradigm of the type etc All that need be noted is that there are certain very limited features of concord or agreement of the verbal form with the subject of the sentence There are, in fact, three kinds... greatly increased, but there have been more books and articles on the verb than on the noun, the adjective or any other class of word One reason, obviously, is that the verb, or rather the verb phrase, as defined in this book, is so central to the structure of the sentence that no syntactic analysis can proceed without a careful consider­ ation of it Another is the great complexity of the internal semantic... only the first is at all generalized [i] All the verbs of the language with the exception of the modal auxiliaries (2.2.1 and ILLI) have two distinct present tense forms One of them, the -s form, is used with the pronouns he, she and it, and singular noun phrases The other, the simple form, is used with all other pronouns, I, you , we and they , and with plural noun phrases We cannot define the two verbal... like the other auxiliaries, it satisfies the other tests and has the characteristics of the modals as stated in Chapter 6 18 The second test of an auxiliary is whether it can come before the subject in certain types of sentence, the order being auxiliary, subject and full verb The most common type of sentence of this kind is the interrogative Examples are: 2 2 3 Inversion Is the boy coming? Will they... be there? Have you seen them yet? Ought we to ask them? In these the auxiliary comes first, before the subject The verb phrase is discontinuous, divided by a noun phrase, the subject of the clause The examples given are all questions, but the test of an auxiliary is not in terms of question For in the first place, a question may be asked without the use of inversion at all, but merely by using the. .. INTRODUCTION IO difference whether there is reference to soon or to SOON in John will soon come In Chapter 10, however, where the compound verbs consist of verb plus particle, the identification of the verb as a lexeme requires that the particle shall be identified in the same way - ego HANG UP, not HANG up The only alternative to the word as the basis of grammatical analysis is the morpheme Thus it is... phrases [iii] The verb BE alone in the language has a special form for the first person singular of the present tense - am 2 1 2 Concord I take, Thou takest, He takes , Although the ultimate test of an auxiliary verb must be in terms of its syntagmatic relations with other verbs in the verb phrase , it is a striking and, perhaps, fortunate characteristic of English that the auxiliary verbs are marked... found with terms such as 'noun' and 'verb' 'The noun cat' is different from 'the noun CAT' Take, takes, taking, taken are all verbs, but only in the sense of being verb forms of the verb (Iexeme) TAKE It may be noted that traditionally the lexeme is referred to as 'the verb "to take"' , but this is not particularly helpful It is still necessary to distinguish the form (the 'to-infinitive' - see 2 1 )... index Verb index Subject index To Andrew and George CONTENTS 259 260 265 Preface This book is, in effect, a second revised version of A Linguistic Study of the English Verb , published in 1965 ; the first revision appeared as The English Verb in 1974 There has been consider­ able rewriting and reorganization of all the chapters, except the last (now 11 instead of 9) , but the major changes are in the. .. detailed discussion of the issues raised in this chapter, see Palmer 1984.) Chapter 2 Th e verb p h rase The topic of this book is restricted to those characteristics of the English verb that can be handled within the verb phrase It does not deal with those that are best dealt with in terms of sentence structure , except where they are directly relevant to the features of the verb phrase The issue of, for ... forms of the verb there are in Latin, the answer will be over a hundred, and the same is true for classical Arabic For English, on the other hand, there are at most only five forms: the verb 'to... is the interrogative Examples are: Inversion Is the boy coming? Will they be there? Have you seen them yet? Ought we to ask them? In these the auxiliary comes first, before the subject The verb. .. you I like it and so they We saw them and so did he THE VERB PHRASE 20 In none of these examples is the whole verb phrase repeated in the second part In all of them the only verbal form after