The Verb in Action; Doing, Being, and Having

We are all taught that verbs are the doing words. Later, we learn, or figure out, that they're also having and being words (is am are was were...), but we forget how hard they actually work in a sentence. So, I thought it was time to revive and update this post I wrote in 2018 about verbs, how much they do, and why we shouldn't underestimate them.

So, what can verbs do?

Verbs can be explicit: The man walked. And when carefully chosen they can do the work of adjectives too, revealing emotion, mood and tone: The man stomped. When verbs collaborate to create passive sentences, they push around nouns, heaving them from one end of a sentence to the other until The cat hit the dog becomes The dog was hit by the cat. A clunky type of sentence, called a passive sentence, that makes the recipient of the action the subject of the sentence. You've probably heard of passive sentences. More often than not, we're told not to use them, but they do have a purpose, and should be used sparingly and deliberately. I'll probably make them the topic of their own post and explain how and when they're best used..

Verbs are the backbone of a sentence, the core. Even the smallest sentence possible is an imperative sentence-type, containing a single verb: Go! Run! Stop! and so on. Technically, and aside from the sentence fragment, used for a bit of creative licence, the verb is the only word class that can exist in isolation and still be called a sentence; that's a big achievement for one word! So basically verbs are a bigger deal than you might think.

So, how do we underestimate them?

If we go back to the research, we know that DLD adolescents have vocabulary deficits, but generally produce more nouns than verbs (Oetting et al., 1995; Windfuhr et al., 2002). But this verb deficit doesn't appear to be a problem that is exclusive to adolescents with Developmental Language Disorder; the rest of us can neglect verbs.

We read and hear the words 'affected' and 'impacted' quite a bit and sometimes use them ourselves; I've been guilty of writing 'positively impacted' and 'negatively affected'. The only thing is, if we don't monitor our use of these words then we can get into the habit of injecting these into every sentence. If we do this then our repertoire of verbs can dwindle rather quickly. Eventually, you may even find yourself using these verbs as a one-size-fits-all solution to every sentence you write.

affected and impacted can not only fins their way into the verb phrase of a sentence but can hijack most of the predicate. Take the following sentence.

The speech had a positive impact on the people.

In the example above, not only have we reduced the verb phrase to a insipid 'had', we've also attributed 'positive impact' (an adjective-noun combo, that works here as a subject complement) to 'the speech'; which also sounds funky because we are still not talking about the effect of the speech, or what it actually did, but what it had, when 'the speech' would clearly benefit from a subject-verb-object construction. We also lose specificity: What was the positive impact exactly? Did the speech educate? inspire? motivate? calm? We don't really know. Context could contribute more, but we could communicate what the speech did by inserting a verb in place of 'had a positive impact on': 'The speech calmed...' might imply the placation of a riotous crowd; 'The speech inspired...' suggests the speech energised the audience; while 'motivate' makes us picture a boss praising her employees.

Whether we have impacted/affected or had a negative/positive impact, we might not have done anything specific or clear. For some alternatives to positively and negatively affected/impacted, you can see my sheet of suggestions here. I haven't revised it in years and there are plenty of verbs you could add.

REFERENCE LIST

Oetting, JB, ML Rice and LK Swank, "Quick Incidental Learning (QUIL) of Words by School-age Children With and Without SLI." Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 38.2 (1995): 434-445.

Windfuhr, KL, B Farther and G Conti-Ramsden, "Lexical Learning Kills in Young Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI)." International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 37.4 (2002): 415-432.