Notional and functional verbs

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СТУДЕНТЫ Ю. В. Киселёва, А.Д. Данилова, ЛИНб-1303

ПРЕПОДАВАТЕЛЬ Т. Г. Никитина

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Verb as a part of speech

General characteristic

Grammatically the verb is the most complex part of speech. The verb expresses an action or process undertaken by the subject, or a situation defining the subject. First of all it performs the central role in realizing predication - connection between situation in the utterance and reality. That is why the verb is of primary informative significance in an utterance. Besides, the verb possesses quite a lot of grammatical categories. Furthermore, within the class of verb various subclass divisions based on different principles of classification can be found.

Semantic features of the verb. The verb possesses the grammatical meaning of verbiality - the ability to denote a process developing in time. This meaning is inherent not only in the verbs denoting processes, but also in those denoting states, forms of existence, evaluations, etc.

Morphological features of the verb. The verb possesses the following grammatical categories: tense, aspect, voice, mood, person, number, finitude and phase. The common categories for finite and non-finite forms are voice, aspect, phase and finitude. The grammatical categories of the English verb find their expression in synthetical and analytical forms. The formative elements expressing these categories are grammatical affixes, inner inflexion and function words. Some categories have only synthetical forms (person, number), others - only analytical (voice). There are also categories expressed by both synthetical and analytical forms (mood, tense, aspect).

Syntactic features. The most universal syntactic feature of verbs is their ability to be modified by adverbs. The second important syntactic criterion is the ability of the verb to perform the syntactic function of the predicate. However, this criterion is not absolute because only finite forms can perform this function while non-finite forms can be used in any function but predicate. And finally, any verb in the form of the infinitive can be combined with a modal verb.

The Types of Verbs

The classification of verbs can be undertaken from the following points of view:

1) meaning

2) form - formation;

3) function.

Notional and functional verbs

According to their meaning verbs fall under two groups: notional and functional.

Notional verbs have full lexical meaning of their own. The majority of verbs fall under this group: e.g.: to work, to build, to lie, to love, etc.

Functional verbs differ from notional ones of lacking lexical meaning of their own. They cannot be used independently in the sentence; they are used to furnish certain parts of sentence (very often they are used with predicates).

Functional verbs are subdivided into three: link verbs, modal verbs, auxiliary verbs.

Link verbs connect the nominative part of the predicate (the predicative) with the subject.

They can be of two types: pure and specifying link verbs.

Pure link verbs perform a purely predicative-linking function in the sentence; in English there is only one pure link verb to be;

Specifying link verbs specify the connections between the subject and its property, cf.: He was pale. – He grew pale. The specification of the connections may be either “perceptional”, e.g.: to seem, to look, to feel, etc., or “factual”, e.g.: to grow, to become, to get, etc. The functional link verbs should be distinguished from homonymous notional verbs, e.g.: to grow can be a notional verb or a specifying link verb, cf.: The child grew quickly. – He grew pale.

Modal verbs are small group of verbs which usually express the modal meaning, the speaker’s attitude to the action, expressed by the notional verb in the sentence. They lack some grammatical forms like infinitive form, grammatical categories and so on. Thus, they do not have all the categories of verbs. They may express mood and tense since they function as parts of predicates. They lack the non-finite forms.

Besides in present-day English there is another group of verbs which are called auxiliaries.

They are used to form analytical forms of verbs. Verbs: to be, to do, to have and so on may be included to this group.

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