18.02.2009 - Day 3 - session 9 w/ Mavis Radley

This session was about Language Analysis. I found it a bit confusing as we did not have enough time to discuss all the different tasks from the handouts.

We started by discussing what a verb was and Mavis gave us a definition later on:

A verb is a word which:

a) occurs as part of the predicate of a sentence;

b) carries grammatical categories such as tense, aspect (progressive / perfect), person, number etc.

c) refers to an action or state.

Then we discussed what a verb phrase was and 2 definitions were given by Mavis:

1. The part of sentence which contains the main verb and also any objects, complements, and adverbials. Longman Dictionary

2. Can consist of one word or of more than one word in which case the phrase consists of a head verb preceded by one or more auxiliary verbs - no mention of objects, complements etc.

As we can see above, not even authorities can agree on a definition!

After that, we analysed types of verbs from a handout given by Mavis:

- Irregular verbs differ from regular verbs due to their suffixes.

- Auxiliary verbs carry no meaning as apposed to lexical verbs.

- Participles or infinitives are called non-finite verbs because they play a different role in a sentence (noun, object etc.).

- Chain verbs are lexical verbs followed by other lexical verbs. e.g. begin testing, start learning.

- Intransitive verbs do not take an object.

- Stative verbs do not vary in aspect as opposed to dynamic verbs (action).