How Verbs and Clauses Work (updated 9/1/2020) Felicia Jean Steele In our introduction, I wrote about the nine parts of speech. Most of them are probably familiar to you from elementary school or from Grammar Rock or Mad Libs: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Part of the humor of Mad Libs comes from the fact that not all nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions work entirely the same way in all the same environments. In this reading, we will talk explicitly about verbs and about what happens when we put a noun and a verb together—the clause. When we complete a Mad Libs, we happily fill in the blanks with present and past tense verbs without blinking an eye. When the game asks us to provide a past tense verb, we generally fill it in with a simple -ed form of a verb, such as loved, walked, acted. If we're feeling saucy, we'll use one of the “irregular” verbs: swam, wrote, ran. In both cases, we use past tense forms to signify actions or states we have performed or experienced in a time prior to our present moment. In the simplest possible terms, English only changes the form of verbs to indicate a change from present to past time. As a result, linguists say that English has two grammatical tenses: present and past. Tense, or the time of an action or state, isn't the only quality that verbs reflect. Verbs also reflect their mood, voice, and aspect. In some languages, these properties are represented by adding an affix (prefix or suffix) to the actual word. In English, when a speaker uses the imperative mood— the mood of commands—there is no difference in the shape or sound of the word than if they were using the first-person form in the indicative mood—the mood used in everyday language. A teacher raises her voice and says, “Listen!” She says, “Listen!” whether she's speaking to one student or many; this word sounds and looks exactly the same as it would if she were saying “I listen to music every evening.” By contrast, a Latin magister (teacher) would command one student with the following: “Audī!” He'd yell “Audīte” to a group of students. In Latin, speakers add either an -ī or -īte to indicate the imperative mood. Most Indo-European languages (one of which is English) preserve three moods: indicative, imperative, and subjunctive. Linguists also recognize a number of other moods, including optative, conditional, and interrogative, but few languages have inflections (those prefixes and affixes mentioned above) to indicate them. Most languages, including English, reflect these moods periphrastically—by means of multiple words assembled in a string. English also requires periphrastic constructions to express the other two properties of verbs: voice and aspect. Composition teachers regularly chastise students for overusing the passive voice 1 which is not a form of a single verb but a periphrastic construction comprised of a form of the verb “to be” and the past participle of the verb that the speaker wants to passivize. The passive voice contrasts with the active voice. The primary difference between the two syntactic constructions has to do with the subject of the verbs at hand. A verb is called “active” when its subject is the agent of the action that the verb expresses. One easy way to remember the connection between the “agent” of the verb and the “active voice” is to remember that the two words—agent and active—are cognate, or related, words. In a passive sentence, the subject of the verb is the patient—or direct object—of the verb. Once again, the words passive and patient are cognate with one another. In the following two sentences, we can see the difference between the two syntactic structures: Active Voice: The dog chased the truck. Passive Voice: The truck was chased by the dog. In the active sentence, the “dog” is the subject of the sentence and the agent who “chased” the patient, “the truck.” In the passive sentence, the subject, “the truck,” is the patient who was “chased.” Since the passive construction requires the verb “to be” in addition to the verb “chase” in its past participial form, it's called a periphrastic (multi-word). Perhaps this would be a good moment to review another grammatical term that seems familiar enough, but which we don't generally remember thoroughly. Every verb has principle parts: forms that serve speakers as they express different tenses and aspects. Generally speaking, grammarians recognize the following as “principal parts”: the bare infinitive, past tense, past participle, and present participle. The past and present participles are essential to the expression of grammatical aspect in English. Although linguists have formulated thorough explanations of aspect, most people are unfamiliar with the term. Many of us learned that English had as many as twelve separate tenses! Quite famously, Toni Morrison talked about the five present tenses of African American English (LeClair 27). Part of the reason for confusion as speakers of English learn about other languages is that our grammars tend to conflate tense and aspect. As we've already discussed, we can't really think about more than two real grammatical tenses: present and past. Grammatical tenses have patterns of inflections (in this case, suffixes) that speakers use to indicate the change in time. The other ten “tenses” that we find in grammar handbooks are really expressions of different aspects working within three time frames: present, past, and future. When we think of aspect, we need to make sure we're thinking about the 2 nature of an action and not the time when it occurred. Some languages can express the nature of an action grammatically using only a single verb form. For example, if you spoke French and wanted to indicate that you performed an action habitually in the past, you would use the “imparfait” (or imperfect) form of the verb. Thus, the sentence, “When I was a child, I used to play in the park,” would be expressed using an “imparfait” aspect in French to indicate that playing was a habitual action in past time. The French translation is: “Quand j'étais enfant, je jouais dans le parc.” The verbs etais and jouais are both conjugated in their imperfect forms, which express habitual actions in the past. While French has an inflectional ending for this particular set of aspectual distinctions, like English it must rely upon periphrastic constructions to express other aspects, such as the perfective. Typically, linguists recognize two clearly delineated aspects in English, although varieties of English that are often stigmatized have many more aspectual constructions: progressive and perfect. Using the verb “to read” we can generate present, past, and future progressives with little difficulty: Present progressive: You are reading this essay. Past progressive: I was reading about aspect before I started writing this essay. Future progressive: You will be reading more about the English language in this course. In each of these sentences, the present participle (the -ing) form of the verb “to read” indicates that the action is ongoing in each time frame: present, past, and future. The participle itself does not determine the time of the action, only its nature as an ongoing action. The past participle, by contrast, indicates that actions are complete or “perfect” in each time frame. While progressive forms use the verb “to be” as an auxiliary verb that indicates the time frame of the action, perfective forms use the auxiliary “have.” As a result, we can easily distinguish between perfect forms of verbs and their passive counterparts. For example, the two sentences below are distinct in terms of “voice,” even though they both employ the past participle: Passive voice (present tense): Verbs are written about in this essay. Active voice (present perfect): I have written about verbs in this essay. So although both sentences use the past participle form “written” in their verb phrases, the sentences have radically different meanings: in the first sentence, “verbs” is the subject of the sentence and the topic that readers focus their attention upon, while, in the second sentence, “I” is 3 both the subject and the focus of readerly attention. Passive sentences can be expressed in a present perfect, but only with the addition of present tense forms of “have” + the past participle of “to be,” “been”: “Verbs have been written about by many people.” Although some readers might interpret the “completed” nature of the action as a result of the passive voice, it isn't. It is a feature of the perfect instead. Although the perfect suggests “completed action,” completed actions can exist in all three time frames: present, past, and future tenses. Thus, we can change our earlier “progressive” verbs into “perfects” by replacing “to be” + “present participle” with “to have” + “past participle.” Present perfect: You have read about the progressive aspect. Past perfect: You had read about tense before you read about aspect. Future perfect: You will have read much more about verbs before you finish this essay. Since aspect denotes the nature of an action and not the time in which it has taken place, they can also be combined into more complex forms. Speakers of English can construct perfect progressive forms, which suggest that an an ongoing action with a distinct termination point took place in the present, past, or future time frames. The connotations of the present perfect progressive are somewhat difficult to understand, although the past and future perfect progressive are much easier to get a handle on for most speakers.