Verb

A verb (from Latin verbum 'word') is word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand).

In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive.

In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice.

A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object.

For example: Every language discovered so far makes a some form of noun-verb distinction,[1] possibly because of the graph-like nature of communicated meaning by humans, i.e. nouns being the "entities" and verbs being the "links" between them.

[2] In languages where the verb is inflected, it often agrees with its primary argument (the subject) in person, number or gender.

Latin and the Romance languages inflect verbs for tense–aspect–mood (abbreviated 'TAM'), and they agree in person and number (but not in gender, as for example in Polish) with the subject.

On the other hand, Basque, Georgian, and some other languages, have polypersonal agreement: the verb agrees with the subject, the direct object, and even the secondary object if present, a greater degree of head-marking than is found in most European languages.

Intransitive verbs may be followed by an adverb (a word that addresses how, where, when, and how often) or end a sentence.

The second element (noun phrase, adjective, or infinitive) is called a complement, which completes a clause that would not otherwise have the same meaning.

In English, French and German, they require a dummy pronoun and therefore formally have a valency of 1.

Depending on the language, verbs may express grammatical tense, aspect, or modality.

Grammatical tense[7][8][9] is the use of auxiliary verbs or inflections to convey whether the action or state is before, simultaneous with, or after some reference point.

The reference point could be the time of utterance, in which case the verb expresses absolute tense, or it could be a past, present, or future time of reference previously established in the sentence, in which case the verb expresses relative tense.

Important examples include: Aspect can either be lexical, in which case the aspect is embedded in the verb's meaning (as in "the sun shines", where "shines" is lexically stative), or it can be grammatically expressed, as in "I am running."

This is especially common among verb-final languages, where attributive verb phrases act as relative clauses.