Article on the Flaws in Most of the
Current Definitions of the Verb (and Now Corrected by the Strategies of the Hunter Writing System: Sentence Sense Text)

This article was printed in the Tennessee English Journal [1997, 43-46]).  It demonstrates how the traditional definitions of a verb as "a word that shows action" or "a state-of-being word" are alarmingly flawed.

Why Johnny and Janie Can't Find Verbs¹
Anthony Hunter
State University of
New York College of Technology at Delhi
Delhi, New York

To my amazement, 85% of a college freshman composition class scored 0 when they were asked to find in a 161-word long passage "all the verbs at the center of sentences or clauses (but not those at the center of phrases)" and to "include helping verbs when appropriate."  For every word that they had correctly identified as a verb, they had either overlooked a verb or had identified as a verb a word that had some other function (Hunter, "Pretest on Verbs").

Such scores would not be so alarming if the students had not already spent 12 years in class in elementary and secondary schools (in New York State) and/or if the verb were some secondary element in a sentence.  But they had had 12 years of instruction in English; and the verb is the very core of the English sentence--the grammatical linchpin, if you will--for every other grammatical element that makes up the sentences in which they are found.  For example, no subject, object of verb, or predicate nominative can stand independently of its accompanying verb.  Besides, most adjectives are found inside the subject, object-of-verb, or predicate-noun territories.  Moreover, most adverbs are modifiers of verbs.

Why are vast proportions of our youth at such a loss when it comes to finding the single most important component of a sentence?  The answer, I am convinced, is that traditional grammar--as taught in our schools today--gives students no consistently trustworthy clue as to how to find verbs in the types of sentences that occur outside of practice manuals.

If your students were asked to find the verb in the sentence My run around the block tired me, my guess is that most would select run, the word that shows action, before they would select the correct word tired.

My contention is that it is the textbook definitions of a verb that are derailing students. The commonplace schoolbook definitions of verbs as "words that show action" and "state-of-being words" are the foremost reasons for students' failure to find verbs successfully (and, I would add, to compose effectively and/or to unravel any but the simplest of sentences in English).

The following discussion will indicate six ways in which either the word-that-shows-action or the state-of-being-word "definition" of a verb deceives students.  The section that follows will furnish a kind of proof based on analysis of a Time cover-story article.  A subsequent section will supply an introduction to two failsafe strategies for helping students find verbs.

Textbook Definitions of Verbs Deceive Students

Helping Verbs Do Not Show Action

Not one of the twenty-three key helping verbs in English shows action.  Since these twenty-three words are not only genuine components of verbs but even serve as markers of where a verb begins, students must recognize them as the verb words that they are.

Here are examples of helping verbs at work (they are the words in capital letters):

We do swim often.
         No one has decided.
         Everyone is being told.
         Ed may arrive on time.
         Roberta could be coming too.

The Variant Forms of the Verb BE Do Not Show Action

The verb be can have eight forms when it functions as a main verb.  None of these forms shows action.  Consequently, textbook writers have devised the so-called definition "state-of-being-word" to help students identify these words.  Unfortunately, what they are defining appears to be the predicate noun and predicate adjective that follow the verb as complement.  Nouns like hero, skier, and winner and adjectives like huge, wealthy, and circular that are the genuine state-of-being words. The function of the verb be in such sentences is merely to juxtapose the subject and predicate elements, to be a space-filler between these two elements of the sentence.  (In fact, there are languages that omit the verb between such elements).

Verbals Do Not Function As Verbs

Verbs that are use as verbals or are inside verbal phrases--that is, inside infinitive, participial, and gerund phrases--show action in the same way that verbs at the center of clauses show action.  However, such "verbs" do not function like the verbs that are at the center of clauses; rather, they function either as nouns or adjectives or as parts of a phrase that as a whole can function as a noun, adjective, or adverb.

In these sentences, the highlighted words look like verbs but function instead as a noun (in the first sentence) or as an adjective (in the second sentence).
         Ann enjoys sailing.
         The flying snowflakes ride the wind.

Some Verbs Fail To Show Any Action Whatever

Some bona fide verbs show no action at all.  (In the following examples, the verbs are in capital letters.)
         Many students lack motivation.
         Pablo owns a hat that he does not wear.
         Sensible students have no failing grades.
         Books contain information.
         Buses rest at night.

Nouns Can Show Action, Too

It is typical in English that the same word can function as a noun or a verb.  (When I ask teachers at workshops to write out five verbs, on average three out of five of their words could function as either a noun or a verb.)  Actually, no student can tell whether a word that can function as either a noun or a verb is "showing action" or not until he or she has first read and understood the sentences.  (This poses a serious problem for some students.). Nonetheless, there are many sentences in which, even for the comprehending student reader, a noun would seem to show action more pronouncedly than some accompanying verb--such as in the sentence given above "My run around the block tired me."

Here are more examples.  (The words in capital letters are the nouns that appear to show action.)
       We went for a drive.
       His love of food was his undoing.
       The baby gave a loud cry.
       Every player got a hit.
       His wave was his sign of welcome.

Adjectives and Adverbs Can Indicate Action

Besides nouns, adjectives and adverbs also can indicate action and often more clearly than the verbs in the sentences where one finds them.  Note these examples.  (The words in capital letters are the adjectives and adverbs that appear to show action).
        The fast plane disappeared from sight.
        A frisky dog can be a nuisance.
        He obeyed begrudgingly.
        Pat's swift answer earned her praise.
        Some did their homework lackadaisically.

Proof From Analysis of an Article

The March 21, 1994, cover-story article in Time, "The Trials of Hillary," contained 720 verb words in all.  (See the table on the following page.) Of these, 141 or 20% were helping verbs; 94 or 13% were main verbs from the verb be; 160 or 22% were verbs used as verbals or were in the center of verbal phrases; 79 or 11% were words that functioned as main verbs but that had the same spelling as the noun form for the same word; and 246 or 34% were main verbs that were not from the verb be and could only have functioned as verbs.  In other words, 395 of the 720 words--that is, 55%--were either words that did not show action or were words that did show action but were not functioning as verbs at the center of a clause.  In addition, another 79--or 11%--of the words were in a form that could have been mistaken for a noun.  Is there any wonder that students falter as they try to find verbs?

To look at this another way, in this same article there were 350 additional words that functioned as nouns, adjectives, or adverbs but whose spellings were identical to the spellings a verb could have (263 of these functioned as nouns, 70 as adjectives, and 17 as adverbs).  If you add these 350 words to the 720 verb words (560 verb words and 160 verbals or verbs at the core of verbal phrases), you have a total of 1,070 words that either were verbs, were verbs mistakable as nouns, were verbs not functioning as center-of-clause verbs, or were other parts of speech in a form/spelling mistakable as a verb.

Of these 1,070 words, then, 235 or 22% were helping verbs or were main verbs stemming from the verb be; 160 or 15% were verbals or verbs inside verbals and therefore not functioning as verbs in the usual way; 429 or 40% were verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs that were "switch-hitters" (that is, words whose form/spelling gives no clue as to grammatical function); and only 246 or 23% were main verbs not from the verb be and in a form/spelling proper to a verb alone.  Thus, 824 or 77% of the 1,070 words were susceptible to misidentification by the textbook criterion for finding verbs.  For the 429 or 40% of the words that were "switch-hitters," students could conceivably differentiate verbs from nonverbs successfully two thirds of the time; but that still leaves 143 instances or 13% of the time that they would fail to identify a verb or would identify as a verb a word carrying out the function of a noun, adjective, or adverb instead.  In other words, this 13% of the words--together with the 22% that were helping verbs or main verbs from the verb be and 15% from the verbals group--would total 50% of the words.  Since the minimum likelihood for error for a student who relies solely on the textbook definitions of a verb would then be 50%, is there not reason to believe that our traditional treatment of grammar is seriously flawed?

TABLE

Subjects Do Not Always Help Students Find Verbs

For those who would argue that finding verbs is easy because they are the words that accompany subjects, I would point out three things.  First, some sentences have more than one verb so that this task becomes too complex for most students.  Second, even the foremost subject of a sentence (the one that accompanies the verb in the main clause) can be too long to be of much assistance to students for finding an accompanying verb.  Third, and most importantly, it is the verb that serves as an anchor for a subject (not vice versa).  This is because there is no sure way to find subjects independently of the verb that furnishes its reason for existence.  For a fuller discussion of this and of how best to find subjects, see Anthony Hunter's The Hunter Writing System: Sentence Sense (128-29, 145-47, 253-54).  [See also my other article on this site.]

Valid Strategies for Finding Clause-Centered Verbs

Fortunately, there are two strategies by which students can accurately find those verbs that serve as the hub of a clause.  In fact, these may be the strategies by which all of us really make our determinations as to which words are verbs and which are not.  These strategies rely on the fact that there are two kinds of such verbs:  the kind that starts with a word from the list of twenty-three helping verbs and the kind that does not.

The first strategy is for finding verbs whose first (and sometimes only) word is from the list of helping verbs.  Students can learn to recognize all such words (there are twenty chief ones) and then use them as a springboard for finding accompanying helping verbs (if any) and an accompanying main verb, if any.  For example, in the sentence The cookies may have been eaten, the helping verb may is the springboard for identifying may have been eaten as the whole verb phrase.  By and large, the last word in a verb phrase must be a word that can also legitimately use the suffix -ing way.  For the above sentence The cookies may have been eaten, the word that follows the helping verbs may have been and accompanies them--eaten--is a verb because this word does have the alternate spelling eating.  (Other examples from the list of chief helping verbs are is, have, do, and can.)  For a complete list of the chief helping verbs, see Robert L. Allen, Rita Pompian, and Doris Allen, Working Sentences (inside the back cover).

The second strategy is for finding verbs when none of the words from the list of helping verbs is visible.  Such words must be in a present or past tense form--such as, want, wants, or wanted.  English has an alternative form for each of these expressions of tense and/or number, namely: our do, does, and did substitutions (as in do want, does want, and did want).  The second strategy works like this: Whenever students can use such a substitution as a replacement for a word and still make a sentence that is acceptable English, the word is a verb.  For example, for the sentence Paula worked hard yesterday, they can substitute did work for worked and still have acceptable English; the sentence would read Paula did work hard yesterday.

For more information on the positive effects of the two strategies mentioned above, see "A New Grammar That Has Clearly Improved Writing" (102-107).

Conclusion

If there are valid verb-finding strategies that do enable students to gain insight into how sentences work, then certainly the benefits of learning such strategies deserve to be extensively researched.  Such instruction could conceivably turn out to be an indispensable component of a student's education.

                                            Works Cited

Allen, Robert L., Rita Pompian, and Doris Allen.  Working Sentences. New York: Crowell,1995.

Gibbs, Nancy.  "The Trials of Hillary."  Time 21 March 1994: 28-37. 

Hunter, Anthony D.  "A New Grammar That Has Clearly Improved Writing."  English Journal 85.7 (Nov. 1996): 102­107.

---. 1991.  The Hunter Writing System: Sentence Sense, Red Level. Loudonville, NY: Hunter & Joyce, 1991).

---. 1985. "Pretest on Verbs."  Unpublished test.  29 Oct. 1985. 

¹Copyright 1997 by the Tennessee English Journal (www.tnej.org).
  Used with permission.

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