The English Verb System – Contrastive Approach 1 October 26, 2018
Lesson 4 CLASSIFICATION OF AUXILIARY AND LEXICAL VERBS
According to semantic and formal (morpho-syntactic) criteria, auxiliaries are divided into: primary (be, have, do) secondary (modals: can, may, will, could, might, should, need, dare, etc).
According to the syntactic criteria, i.e. structures in which they occur, lexical verbs could be divided into: linking verbs (copulas) nonlinking verbs. Nonlinking verbs are subdivided into: transitive intransitive.
Linking verbs/copulas e.g: appear, be, become, feel, look, smell, prove, seem, taste, etc. When a sentence contains a linking verb, the complement may be either a noun or an adjective: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Those people are all professors. Those professors are brilliant. This room smells bad. I feel great. A victory today seems unlikely. The difference between linking and action verbs:
6. a) The monkey looked hungry. b) The monkey looked for food. 7. a) The soup tasted good. b) Tom tasted the soup.
Resulting copulas A group of verbs that reflect a change in state of being is sometimes called resulting copulas. They, too, link a subject to a predicate adjective: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
His face turned purple. She became older. The dogs ran wild. The milk has gone sour. The crowd grew ugly. 1