1.4. WORDS AND WORD CLASSES 31
have articles at all. It’s not just that it uses a different way to indicate the
difference between for instance ”a car” and ”the car”: there are no simple
words you can use to show this difference. This might sound like a rather
big tumbling block, but a lot of Asian languages actually don’t have arti-
cles and the people that use those languages can get the meaning across
just fine without them - as we will see when we talk about context later in
this chapter.
1.4.2 Verbs
Verbs are words that represent an action either taking place or being per-
formed, and can be modified to show things like negatives or past tense.
In English, words like ”fly” and ”float” are verbs for actions that are being
performed, and we can make them negative or past tense: ”do not fly”, ”do
not float”, ”flew” and ”floated” respectively. Similarly, words like ”walk”
and ”eat” are verbs for actions that can be performed, and we can make
them negative or past tense too: ”do not walk”, ”do not eat”, ”walked”
and ”ate” respectively. Verbs also have a regularity: walk and float are
regular verbs in that they follow the same rules: past tense is ”... + ed”, but
”fly” and ”eat” areirregular: they do not become ”flyed” and ”eated”, but
”flew” and ”ate”.
Finally, verbs can be transitive, or intransitive. The verb ”walk”, for
instance, is something that you just do. You walk. When you see this kind
of construction in a sentence, we say that the verb is used ”intransitively”
- in contrast, ”eat” is a verb you can either useintransitively(”What are
you doing?” - ”I’m eating”) ortransitively: ”I eat an apple”. In this use,
you’re applying the verb’s action to something: ”I throw the ball”, ”I eat
an apple”, ”I fly a plane” are all examples of this. However, there is some-
thing funny about transitivity: some verbs, like ”walk”, you can only use
intransitively (we don’t say that we ”walked the street”, for instance), but
many verbs can be used either intransitively or transitively, like ”eat”.
There are also a number of verbs that can only be used transitively,
but these are special verbs, typically calledauxiliary verbs. In English,
”have” and ”want” are examples of these. Without an additional ”some-
thing”, these verbs do not have any meaning on their own: saying ”I have.”
or ”I want.” are grammatically incorrect. At the very least, you’d need to
say something like ”I have it.” or ”I want that.” for the verbs to be used
correctly.
Japanese verbs are characterised by a high degree of regularity as,
except for three verbs, all verbs are regular. These regular verbs fall into