A conversation on verbs

Think of verbs as in this way:

• *verb can be considered as a word to connote two forms of action: a) a doing b) a state of being _______(insert verb)

• then from there, you work on that having settled the two states, now comes the 3 time frames that relates to these verbs, namely the past, present and future (in SOME GRAMMAR BOOKS, they'll argue that there were only two; past and present)
• verbs class words can also be used to describe whether the work is a) to be done b) doing [in progress] c) done

a simple way of "proving" these 3 frames would be in this argument a) the base form, which suggests an action to be performed b) the usage of the suffix -ing, which suggest that the certain verb is "still in progress", c) the usage of suffix "-ed", which suggest that a certain action (verb) had completed.

because English has many variations, and each variation is considered "standard" in its own right. That is to say, malaysian english, black english, jamaican english DOES have same credibility as RECEIVED PRONOUNCIATION ENGLISH (the standard benchmark for all english)


irregardless of the numbers of verb tenses having to identify certain key words (which i gave you, like the +ing, the +ed and base form) allows you to recognize the 3 states of the verb .

These verbs, added with other adverbs allows one to recognize the "function" of the verbs in use, that is to describe a)the state of doing / b) the state of being in a)past/ b)present / c)future time frame within a context of a)still doing it b)been doing it, c)had done it

talking about context of a) still doing it, b) been doing it, and c) had done it, you need keywords that identifies the verb is either in the 3 states like the usage of "participles" like "have/had", "had+been/have+been"

so these participles, together with the earlier explanations, will basically give you a rough idea as of HOW a verb functions in a sentence (but does not describe it on a LOGICAL / SEQUENTIAL manner)

why is it so? that's because language is not mathematics where everything can be explained, including the exemptions. language is just language

when you look at the variants of english, you know, black english, afro american english, malaysian english, singlish, sablish, etc etc

You have to allow some level of ambiguity in language because if there's no ambiguity, then you might end up be saying the word "argue" like "rogue, vogue, tongue".


Cheers.