Parts of Speech: 6a. Verbs, A Tense Situation

Of all the parts of speech, there is only one that is the sine qua non of a sentence, without which a sentence cannot be a sentence: the verb. Although all the other parts of speech quantify and qualify, name and indicate, exclaim, connect, and place, and, although they, by degree, give more and better information than only the verb, they cannot, in themselves, be a sentence. Consider:

A mind-blowing experience

Out of the box

Really?

No!

Why?

All such phrases may be written as if they were sentences, in stylistically written paragraphs, but they cannot stand on their own, and, without help from “real sentences,” they are meaningless fragments. One would be forced to ask, What is a mind-blowing experience? What is out of the box? Really what? No what? Or why what?

A verb, on the other hand, can stand alone, and often does just that:

Leave!

Eat!

See?

Enjoy!
Relax!

What Is a Verb?

A verb is a word that connotes action (jump, run, hit, go) or being (am, become, seem, appear).

Of course, one-word sentences can be given as examples of how verbs can stand alone, but all such sentences are receiving silent support. Every such sentence has the second-person pronoun, you, understood. When one says, “Leave!,” he is really saying, “[You] leave!” When one asks, “See?,” he is really asking, “[You] see?”

Principal Parts

In identifying a verb, it is helpful to give its principal parts; that way, one knows how to recognize different forms of the same verb, in somewhat the same way a person might be known by different names: Elizabeth, Betty, Beth, Elizabeth McIntyre, Ms. McIntyre. The principal parts of a verb are the infinitive, present participle, and past participle:

Infinitives: To go, To be

Present Participles: Going, Being

Past Participles: Gone, Been

Tense and Mood

All verbs are capable of having two different qualities: Tense and Mood. Tense is time; it is the form of the verb that tells you when the action or being is taking place:

He has a wonderful sense of style.

(Present tense)

I shall go to court.

(Future tense)

She found her ring.

(Past tense)

There are six basic tenses in English. (There are more, but they are nuanced and unnecessarily complex for our purposes, and, although one recognizes and understands them when encountering them, they are not illustrated here.)

Conjugation

A verb is conjugated by giving its form in a particular tense, as it would be used with first-, second-, and third-person pronouns, both singular and plural:

Singular

I go

You go

He, She, or It goes

Plural

We go

You go

They go

So, when one conjugates a verb, one runs through all those forms, but in each different tense. For simplicity's sake, we'll use only the first person, but the second- and third-person forms would also follow the structure just above.

Present tense: I go (action in the present)

Past tense: I went (action in the past)

Future tense: I shall go* (action in the future)

Present Perfect tense: I have gone (action begun in the past
and continuing into the present, e.g.,
I have gone there every week [and will continue to go].)

Past Perfect tense: I had gone (action begun in the past
and completed in the past before some other event, e.g., 

I had gone fishing by the time he stopped by.)

Future Perfect tense: I shall have gone (action that will begin in the future
and be completed in the future before some other event, e.g.,
I shall have gone to the concert by the time you arrive.)

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*Shall is the auxiliary verb used for the first-person singular and plural (I shall go, we shall go); will is the auxiliary verb used with the second- and third-person singular and plural (you will go; he, she, or it will go; they will go).

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Amuses-Bouches

“The Warren Place Mews were built by wealthy merchant and philanthropist Alfred Tredway White, an advocate for housing for the working class in Brooklyn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”

—“In Cobble Hill, a Mews You Can Use,” Corrie Driebusch, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 15, 2012

A mews, as any anglophile or urban dweller knows, is a kind of back alley, usually closed to automobile traffic, with houses that have been converted from former carriage houses. Some modern dictionaries say that the word can take a singular or plural verb, and do not elaborate, but the only way mews can take a plural verb is when it refers not to a back alley, but to the sound a cat makes: 

The cat’s continuing mews were becoming annoying. 

Perhaps this is what confused Ms. Driebusch (in the quotation above), but the only way in which the word mews (as an alley) can be plural is if there are two of them.

The charming little mews on Manhattan’s Upper West Side is called Pomander Walk.

(One mews)

She lived in one of those little mewses in London.

(More than one mews)

(And forgive Ms. Picky her flawed pun; amuses-bouches, of course, is pronounced aMOOZ-boosh, not aMEWS-boosh.)

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