ESL001: Elementary English as a Second Language

When we look at verbs in more detail, we can easily see how they are very different from the other parts of speech. We already learned that verbs describe an action or a state. Also, verbs are the only part of speech in Standard English that show past, future, or present tense. This is something that may be different from other languages where verbs do not change to show past, present, or future. Let's see what other information we can add to all this to learn more about verbs.

In Standard English, the verb is the main part of every sentence and shows what the subject does or what state the subject is in. When this happens, the verbs are called main or lexical verbs. Some other verbs allow us to show when something happened or help us to create questions and negative statements. These verbs are called helping or auxiliary verbs. The three helping verbs are be, do, and have. These three verbs are special because they can be used as main verbs and helping verbs. Another special type of auxiliary verbs are modal verbs, which add more meaning to the main verb. 

• Robert walks to work. → The action verb "walks" tells us what Robert does.

• He is a teacher.    → The state or linking verb "is" describes Robert's state of being a teacher.

• Does Robert walk to work every day? → The helping verb "do" helps us create a question.

• Robert is walking right now. → The helping verb "be" helps us show when the action happens.

• Robert can teach online classes. → The modal verb "can" describes an ability.

As we see in the examples at the top of this page, when we use helping or modal verbs with main verbs, we create verb phrases.