In syntax, a verb is a word that represents some form of action, occurrence, or state of being.
Valency[]
There are several types of verbs, each with a different kind of valency:
- An impersonal verb takes no arguments, e.g. It rains. (Although it is technically the Subject|subject of the verb, it is only a dummy subject, that is, a syntactic placeholder with no true meaning. No other subject can replace it in this sentence.)
- An intransitive verb takes one argument, a subject, e.g. He sleeps.
- A monotransitive verb takes two arguments, a subject and a direct object, e.g. He kicks the ball.
- A ditransitive verb takes three arguments, a subject, a direct object, and an indirect object, e.g. He gives her a flower.
- A multtitransitive verb takes more than three arguments. There are no examples of multitransitive verbs in English.
The verb requires all of these arguments in a well formed sentence, although they can sometimes undergo changes in valency.
For instance, to eat is naturally transitive, as in he eats an apple, but may be reduced to intransivity in he eats. This is valency reduction. A more codified form of valency reduction is passive voice, i.e. "The apple was eaten."
Verbs that are usually intransitive, like to sleep, cannot take a direct object. However, there are cases where the valency of such verbs can be expanded, for instance in He sleeps the sleep of death. This is called a cognate object.
Verb valence can also be described in terms of syntactic versus semantic criteria. The syntactic valency of a verb refers to the number of dependent arguments that the verb can have, while the semantic valency describes the thematic relations associated with a verb.
Also, verbs in natlangs don't code for the majority of possible arguments. For example, there is no argument "on" such that someone can say, "He gives her an apple on the bench." without the preposition "on", even though this is entirely possible.
Some languages allow valency reduction or expansion through an affix, rather than through context.
Verbal Noun[]
Verbal Conjugation[]
Verbs can be conjugated to a lot of various factors. The most common one is the tense/aspect which is known from English and most languages. But verbs can be conjugated according to person (Romance and Slavic languages), Mood, voice and a lot more in a huge net of conjugations.
| Voice |
| Person |
| Tense |
| Mood |
| Aspect |
Polypersonal agreement[]
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages.