Lesson 1: The Basics of a Sentence
Verb Attributes
Verb attributes are not things you will label while parsing a sentence, but are important to understand, nonetheless.
Number
Like nouns, verbs are either Singular (talking about one person) or Plural (talking about two or more people).
“I ran.” (singular)
“Tom ran.” (singular)
“We ran.” (plural)
“Tom and Casey ran.” (plural)
Notice that even though the verb itself appears in exactly the same form for all four sentences (“ran”), the verb’s subject tells us whether we are talking about one person or multiple people and helps us determine the number of the verb. Many languages have multiple verb forms, the result being that you can tell many of the attributes of a given verb just by looking at the verb itself. English, however, has relatively few verb forms, and therefore context is essential to figuring out the attributes—and the meaning—of a particular verb.
Person
Verbs are 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Person. 1st person refers to self, either in the singular “I” or in the plural “we.” 2nd person is the direct address, both “you” for singular and plural. And 3rd person is the impersonal “he,” “she,” “it,” or proper name in the singular, and “they” in the plural.
Voice
The verb voices are Active and Passive. An active verb is used when the subject of the sentence is doing the action, as in “Carl ate the chinchilla!” Carl is doing the action of eating.
A passive verb is used when the action is being done to the subject, as in “Carl was eaten by the chinchilla!” Here, the action of eating is being done to Carl.
“I will bring Carl to the store.” (active)
“Carl will be brought to the store.” (passive)
“The chinchilla tricks Carl.” (active)
“Carl is being tricked by the chinchilla.” (passive)
What do I do with a passive?!
The passive voice is tricky in a number of aspects. This is true not only in English, but also in the original languages – it’s simply the nature of changing the subject into the recipient of the verbal action. Let’s look at its particular peculiarities in English and how we will parse and diagram them.
In English, a passive verb is made up of a helping ‘to be’ verb + the past participle form of the action verb. What does that all mean?!
I was tricked by Carl.
Firstly, as mentioned in the previous step, the ‘to be’ helping verb helps make the passive voice. As we have already stated for this course, we are not labeling helping verbs separately, but rather including them together with the main verb, since it is all one verbal idea.
I was tricked by Carl.
Secondly, the action verb in a passive is always in the past tense of the form called a participle. We will not cover participles until the end of the course, and it is not necessary that you understand what a participle is in order to recognize a passive. You might have noted that in some cases, like the example above, the past participle verb form is the same as the simple third person past tense.
So how should I label a passive?
Grammars often say that verbs in the passive voice are transitive, not because they take a direct object, but because the action is being done to the subject, making the subject a sort of double duty direct object. However, this complicates things in a way that we do not judge as helpful. So for the purposes of this course, any verb without a DO (regardless of whether it is active or passive) will be labeled as intransitive.
I was tricked by Carl. (S-Vi)
Mood
The verb moods are Indicative, Imperative, and Subjunctive.
Indicative means that the verb is indicating something via a statement, exclamation, or question. Imperative means that the verb is part of a command. Subjunctive refers to verbs expressed in a hypothetical sense—what could or might happen.
“I went home.” (indicative)
“Go home.” (imperative)
“I might go home.” (subjunctive)
Tense
“Verb tense” can have a couple of different meanings. The larger and simpler category is Simple Verb Tense: past, present, and future, and it is exactly what it sounds like.
“James and Jenny ran.” (past tense)
“James and Jenny run.” (present tense)
“James and Jenny will run.” (future tense)
But there are more tenses, right? Yes. For example, we could say “run” or “is running” for the present tense, couldn’t we? We will take a look at more complicated verb tenses in Lesson 2, but for now, just think about each verb tense as whether it happened in the past, is happening now, or will happen in the future.