What Are The Thirteen Types of English Verb - Academic Marker

13/05/2021 What are the thirteen types of English verb?
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What are the thirteen types of

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 Lesson 3 Aims
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Lesson 3
Now that Lessons 1 and 2 are completed, you should hopefully feel more
con dent about identifying English verbs and understanding their various
functions. This third lesson on the subject next aims to explore and
exemplify the thirteen di erent categories of verb that may be
encountered either in every day speech or in academic writing. The
following table brie y outlines these thirteen verb types, each of which
will be discussed in turn and in detail. Please note that (a) these
categories have been subdivided into general, binary, semantic
(meaning-based) and syntactic (structure-based) categories, and (b)
some verbs may be acceptable in more than one category:
General Categories
Both lexical and auxiliary verbs are considered to be general verb types
as these are the broadest of verb classi cations. In truth, every one of the
remaining eleven types explored in this lesson could also be considered
as being either lexical or auxiliary in nature, making these two
classi cations primary and most important.

Type 1: Lexical Verbs
Also known as ‘main’ verbs, lexical verbs are the most common verb
type in the English language. Lexical verbs express a clear meaning and
do not rely on any other verb to be grammatical, although they can be
used in conjunction with other verbs to create larger verb phrases in a
clause. Because by de nition these verbs carry signi cant meaning,
many other types in this list are also lexical in nature.
Type 2: Auxiliary Verbs
Unlike lexical verbs, auxiliary verbs do not contain much of the meaning
of an expression and are instead used to show grammatical features,
such as tense, aspect or modality. Also known as ‘helping’ verbs,
auxiliaries are most usually placed directly before lexical verbs within a
sentence. As is visible in the following examples, auxiliary verbs such as
‘should’, ‘have’ and ‘be’ may be used to show obligatory modality, the
perfect aspect and the continuous aspect, respectively:

Auxiliary verbs can be easily recognised by their two unique features,

which are (1) they require subject-auxiliary inversion when
forming questions (such as where ‘should’ comes before the subject ‘I’ in
‘should I choose English?’), and (2) they are followed by the negator ‘not’
in negative constructions (as in ‘you should not choose English’). Because
of additional unique auxiliary features, this verb type can also be further
categorised in two ways: primary and modal auxiliaries.


2.1 Primary Auxiliary Verbs
There are three

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each has their own forms and functions. These three verbs are ‘be’, ‘do’
and ‘have’:
2.2 Modal Auxiliary Verbs
In addition to these three primary auxiliary verbs, there are nine pure
modal and six semi-modal auxiliary verbs that academic students
should learn to use and recognise, particularly when expressing modality
in speech or when writing assignments. Modality is a very helpful
linguistic feature that communicates a speaker’s attitudes about the
world around them, either through judgements, assessments or
interpretations of the believability, reality, obligation or desirability of a
proposition. Due to its usefulness, students may therefore wish to take
our short course about the grammar of the following fteen modal
verbs:
Binary Categories
The next four classi cations of verb are grouped together because they
exist in an either/or scenario, in which these words either are or are not
semantically, morphologically or syntactically regular, stative, nite or
transitive.

Type 3: Regular/Irregular Verbs
One of the most common binary distinctions among verbs is whether or

not they’re regular in how they’re morphologically formed. Thinking back
to Lesson 2 when the seven verb forms were introduced (such as the
base form or past participle), an irregular verb is one whose seven
formations cannot be easily predicted. While at one end of the regularity
spectrum are some highly irregular verbs such as ‘be’, and at the other
end the relatively formless modals ‘can’ or ‘should’, most verbs fall into
the regular category. Generally speaking, regular verbs have one
principal part called the base form from which all other forms are
predictably created.
Looking at the example regular verb ‘learn’ in the following table, it’s
clear to see that the third-person present form ‘learns’ is created using
the su x ‘-s’ and the past tense and participle forms ‘learned’ are made
by adding ‘-ed’:
Irregular verbs on the other hand such as ‘eat’ are said to have three
principal parts since their past tense (‘ate’) and past participle (‘eaten’)
forms are more di cult to predict. While there may be some discernible
patterns among irregular verbs, these verbs are still irregular in that they
do not follow common structures:
Type 4: Stative/Dynamic Verbs
Another common way of categorising verbs is by dividing them into

stative and dynamic types depending upon the action, event, occurrence
or state of being they describe. Stative verbs are generally those verbs
such as ‘think’ or ‘wish’ which describe conditions or states of being that
are unde nable in duration or are unchanging. Dynamic verbs, on the
other hand, such as ‘research’ or ‘measure’, describe actions and events

that most commonly have a beginning and an end.
As is demonstrated
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stative/dynamic distinction becomes clearer when we see that it’s

ungrammatical to use the continuous ‘-ing’ aspect with stative verbs:
Please note, however, that some verbs may be both dynamic and stative
depending upon their meaning, such as the verb ‘think’ in the following
expressions:
Type 5: Finite/Non-Finite Verbs


Another binary
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when identifying verbs describes whether or not a verb is nite, which is

the ability to express tense or agreement with a related subject.
While nite verbs can demonstrate tense and subject-verb agreement,
and can occur as the singular verb of an independent clause, non- nite
verbs cannot show such grammatical exibility. As the following
examples demonstrate, non- nite verbs cannot be in ected and can only
occur alone in a clause when that clause is dependent:
When remembering the seven verb forms that we introduced in Lesson 2,

it becomes clear that non- nite verbs are usually in nitives, participles
and gerunds.

Type 6: Transitive/Intransitive Verbs
The nal binary distinction among verbs explores whether or not a verb
is transitive and can take an object or intransitive and cannot. Two
things can be noticed in the following table: (1) transitive verbs have
three types depending on how many arguments (subjects and objects)

they can take,

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transitive depending on their use and meaning:
Semantic Categories
Another method for categorising verbs is by grouping them semantically

– based on their meanings. Four di erent such types have been identi ed
below.
Type 7: Causative Verbs
The rst semantic category of verbs are called causatives. Causative

verbs such as ‘let’, ‘have’ and ‘make’ express the act of one person or
thing causing another person or thing to do or receive something, as in
the expression ‘you should let him help you study’. There are roughly fty
verbs in the English language that are able to form transitivity-increasing
causative constructions:

Type 8: Mental-State Verbs
Related to deciding,
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general contents of our minds that cannot be externally evaluated,

mental-state verbs such as ‘know’, ‘hope’ or ‘believe’ are most often
stative and extremely polysemous – indicating that each verb can
demonstrate a variety of state-based meanings. In academic
argumentative writing, such verbs can be particularly useful when
qualifying the opinions and facts of other authors. Indeed, it’s far more
common and cautious to use expressions such as ‘researchers believe
that…’ than overly con dent expressions such as ‘it is a fact that…’.
Type 9: Performative Verbs
The third semantic categorisation describes those limited set of verbs

that clearly demonstrate a speech-act being performed. In other words,
the word being said creates the action being described, such as ‘promise’
in ‘I promise to be on time’ or ‘apologise’ in ‘I apologise for being late’. In
both these examples, the performative verbs ‘promise’ and ‘apologise’
create the very assurance and the apology.
Type 10: Reporting Verbs
The nal semantic category of verb is the reporting verb, which is a verb
type that allows the speaker or writer to directly or indirectly report the
words of others. Such verbs as ‘argue’ or ‘note’ are particularly useful in
academic writing as they allow the writer to introduce sources into their
research through expressions such as ‘Smith (2010) argues that 90% of
air pollution is created in Asia’:
Syntactic Categories
The nal three verb types have been categorised mostly by the
syntactic structures they require, such as whether a particular verb must
be followed by a complement, a verb phrase or a speci c particle,
preposition or adverb.
Type 11: Copular Verbs
Copular (or linking) verbs are a restricted set of verbs such as ‘be’ or
‘feel’ that may not take objects within a clause. Instead, to be
grammatical, copular verbs require a nominal or adjectival complement
that provides more information about the clause subject, such as ‘Mr
Smith is a teacher’ or ‘Jane feels sick’. In both of these examples, the
complements ‘a teacher’ and ‘sick’ provide more information about the
subjects ‘Mr Smith’ and ‘Jane’, respectively. Because the copular verbs
‘be’ and ‘feel’ in these examples could be replaced with an equals sign (=)
and the meaning would be much the same, this demonstrates that
copular verbs carry little meaning and are more grammatical in nature –
connecting subject with complement:

Type 12: Catenative Verbs
Catenative verbs are those special types of lexical verbs such as ‘want’,
‘like’ or ‘help’ that aren’t primary or modal auxiliary verbs but that can be
followed by another lexical verb within the same clause. Derived from the
Latin word for ‘chain’, catenative verbs are special in that they may be
used in combination to create a chain of non- nite verbal complements,
as in the following example: ‘We agreed to try to buy a new laptop today’.
The type of non- nite verb that’s required in such a chain however
(whether a gerund, a bare-in nitive or a to-in nitive), depends entirely on
the verb – with some verbs being able to take multiple types:
Type 13: Phrasal Verbs
The nal verb type on our list is the phrasal verb, which is one of the
most common and challenging verb types for non-native speakers of
English. In brief, a phrasal verb is a combination of a lexical verb and
either a preposition or an adverbial particle (or both) that creates a
unique and often idiomatic meaning:
Because such verbs are so varied and complex in their grammar, you
may wish to complete our short course speci cally on the subject of
phrasal verbs.
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